


Interrogatives?—Season 6

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Interrogatives? [5]
Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, Dating, Engagement, Estrangement, F/M, Family, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Humor, Male-Female Friendship, Partners to Lovers, Romance, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-18 07:02:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 21,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29854347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: So. Yeah. I completely broke up with the show and then . . . pandemic? And the worst semester of my life? And general world on fire? In any case, I watched through the series again and did a story per episode, just as I did with Dialogic, and then with Object Lessons. So each chapter is an independent, episode-based story. It will take me a while to get these posted, but there are another 151 stories and I'll divvy them up by season. Oh, I suppose this is obvious, but each story is prompted by a question posed in the episode.
Relationships: Javier Esposito/Lanie Parish, Jenny O'Malley Ryan/Kevin Ryan, Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Series: Interrogatives? [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2096184
Comments: 10
Kudos: 8





	1. A Tempo—Valkyrie (6 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She keeps him up late talking that first night—the night he surprises her, the night she tells him he shouldn’t have come, even as she’s working at his belt buckle with absolutely furious determination. 

> _“You know what the hardest thing about this job is?”  
>  — Rachel McCord, Valkyrie (6 x 01) _

* * *

She keeps him up late talking that first night—the night he surprises her, the night she tells him he shouldn’t have come, even as she’s working at his belt buckle with absolutely furious determination. 

They are desperate for each other that first time. It is sloppy and raw and involves no small amount of banged-up joints and possible threats to her security deposit. 

They are quiet, sincere, intense, _reverent_ the second time. And then she keeps him up late talking. It’s fine with him. He’s still on California time. It would be fine with him if he were on Timbuktu time, but she must be exhausted. 

“No,” she says firmly each time he brings up the idea that she must need her rest. “But if you’re tired …” 

He meets _that_ nonsense with his own, emphatic negatory and the beat goes on. She lets her fingers play over his chest as she asks question that range far and wide. She wants to know if anyone has dared to touch his chair. She wants to know how the plants at he loft are doing and what the situation is with Esposito’s ugly ties. She urgently wants to know if Ryan has gotten any better at all when it comes to swaddling the stupid doll.

“Well, I haven’t seen his technique in a few weeks”—he reaches for his phone where it’s peeking out of the breast pocket of his now-worse-for-wear shirt, “But I can’t imagine he’s gotten any less squeamish about imaginary—“ 

“A few weeks. You were away!” She sounds surprised. She sounds annoyed with herself, and it’s all out of proportion. “I haven’t even asked about—“ 

“Preoccupied.” He reaches down to trail his fingers up from just above her knee to the inward curve of her waist. “You’ve been busy, busy.” He drums his fingers playfully against her ribs. “There’ll be plenty of time …” He trails off, feeling suddenly like the idiot he clearly is. 

“Plenty of time,” she laughs and he’s relieved there’s some actual humor into it. There’s some actual levity as she scootches her way further into his embrace. “No such thing, really.” 

“No such thing.” He matches her tone. It’s simple mirroring at first—a simple matter of reflecting her lightness, her inquisitive, wistful demeanor. “If you’ll just speak into the microphone here, I’ll cobble together a time machine and let five-years-ago Beckett know that I’ll totally grow on her.” 

“Like fungus.” Her fingers have crept across the minimal space between them. She pinches at his hip and smiles hard against the underside of his jaw. “Very hard to combat fungus.” 

“Oh, is it combat you want?” He seizes her wrist. He hooks her calf with his and flips her body beneath his. “I can deliver combat?” 

“No combat,” she says from beneath him. She reaches up to cup his cheek, and she might as well have tased him for all his surprise at her sudden, earnest stillness. “I’ll take that time machine, though.” 

“Oh, yeah?” He tries to keep his tone neutral. It’s no mean feat, given the swell of concern that rises up and mixes with something pretty unhealthy, something that looks suspiciously like _I-told-you-so_ relief, suspiciously like _please-tell-me-you-regret-this_ hope. He strangles that once and for all, that lingering mean-ness that he hates himself for. He kicks it away from himself. “What’s your time machine poison, Agent Beckett?”

“I’d just—“ She gropes for the words. She ducks her head deeper into the curve of his neck. “I’d just make everything stretch. Our phone calls and weekends like this. I’d stretch them all out so you could tell me everything, about …” 

“Everything about everything?” he asks lightly when it seems as if she can’t really go on. “Kate, I am a master storyteller. I can condense, I can abridge, I can give you the good-parts version of everything.” He nudges at her cheek with his nose. He’s checking for tears. He’s telling her with his own body and breath that he’d do anything to make this better for her—to make this work. “You can have any version of everything any time you like.” 

“I’m homesick,” she says at last. There are no tears, exactly, but there’s a shuddering breath. There’s a smallness to her voice—to her entire presence in this room, this place, this city, this version of the world. “God, Castle, I didn’t even know how homesick I was until I almost shot you.” 

She’s trying to put a little humorous spin of her own on things. He tries to meet her in that spirit, painful as it is. “Well, of course you’re homesick for almost shooting me. Almost shooting me is, like, your favorite pastime.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Climbing out of this stretch of episodes. Is that a thing? NOPE.


	2. N-Dimensional—Dreamworld (6 x 02)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is no room for her in the hospital bed. There is hardly even room for him in the hospital bed. She winces every time she sees his feet pressed flat against the footboard, his knees bent and splayed out to the sides, because it’s not nearly long enough. There’s no room for her, but he lifts the edge of the sheet that’s been bleached and starched often enough to stand at attention. He scooches his hips to the side and holds his arm high to make room. 

> _“So where are you in the investigation?”_   
>  _— Richard Castle, Dreamworld (6 x 02)_

* * *

There is no room for her in the hospital bed. There is hardly even room for _him_ in the hospital bed. She winces every time she sees his feet pressed flat against the footboard, his knees bent and splayed out to the sides, because it’s not nearly long enough. There’s no room for her, but he lifts the edge of the sheet that’s been bleached and starched often enough to stand at attention. He scooches his hips to the side and holds his arm high to make room. 

She takes him up on it, of course. She clambers up and settles in. She presses her ear to his heart. She doesn’t trust the diabolical beeping thing as far as she can throw it, and she’s constantly two seconds away from doing some data collection on that hypothesis. 

A parade of minions enters and leaves. Every one does a double-take when they catch sight of her cuddled up with him in her suit, her starched white Oxford—the unofficially official uniform of the female Agent of the Bureau. Apparently female Agents of the Bureau are not inclined to cuddle, but she does. He makes room, and she does. 

There’s no time, either. He is beyond exhausted. He nods off unexpectedly, and even when he does manage to stay awake, his attention span is even more nonexistent than usual. And she is still, theoretically, busy. She is still, theoretically, working to impress, working to make her mark, so even though McCord, within limits, is trying to cover for her—even though Villante has extended the deepest sympathies of himself, the AG, the DOJ, the Bureau, and everyone on the special investigative team, sympathy is not just another word for take the time you need. 

“I should let you …” she says, trailing off. 

“Your family …” That comes to an abrupt end. 

“What are _you?”_ He demands sharply. He is exhausted and Pi has only just left the premises. Pi has just spoken for some enormous number of minutes without a breath, and there is just no _time_ except the time they make for each other. 

“Here,” she says as she kicks off her shoes and snatches at the sheet. She clambers and he scooches. She presses her ear to his heart and he tangles his fingers in her hair. She wrestles her phone from her pocket and texts something noncommittal to McCord. “I am _here,_ Castle. For the duration.” 

He is happy with that. He is happy to have her talk nonsense about nothing. He is happy to doze while she cites chapter and verse of the U. S. Code she’s been committing to memory over the last two months. He is happy, and it’s time well spent, even though they’re both thinking about looming departure. They’re thinking about the not-too-far-off time when he’s well enough to be discharged. They’re thinking about looming separation—too much space, too much time apart. 

There’s no solution to this that she can see. He nods off and it overwhelms her. A tear escapes her—the first since this whole ordeal began—and another and another. They’re tears of exhaustion, mostly. They are the tears of catharsis—the exodus of fear that she’d had to keep pent up the whole while that he was in danger. 

“There’s always a solution,” he murmurs. She thinks at first that he’s simply talking in his sleep—that the vivid dreams that are _his_ catharsis have him in their grip again. But he strokes her hair in that intricate, methodical pattern she knows so well. She tips her head back and he’s smiling at her from up above an awkward, tucked-in chin. “No perfect crime.” 

“This might be,” she mutters. “This stupid job.” 

The dragging fingers don’t stop, exactly. They slow for one fraction of one second. 

“The job’s not stupid.” There’s the barest thread of disappointment in his tone. There’s a tiny sliver of his heart that wishes she _did_ think the job was stupid, that she would just come home. “You don’t think it’s stupid.” 

“I don’t.” She jabs him in the ribs for making her say it. “But I don’t know what the solution is.” 

“It’s in the story,” he says breezily, as though it’s the most obvious idea in the world. “You bang your head on the wall, you keep trying fancy things, and then there it is, the solution right in the story already. You just have to look.” 

He’d drifting off again in that bed that doesn’t have any space. He’s drifting off, and they don’t know how much more time they might have like this. He’s smiling to himself, though. He’s smiling in his sleep, and she wants to believe: There _is_ a solution. It’s already in their story. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Time and space and Pi—all fictional. All not things. 


	3. Frenemies—Need to Know (6 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is all a weird dynamic. He doesn’t have much experience with this stuff. Weird dynamics, yes. Martha Rodgers is obviously Weird Dynamic royalty and he spent his formative years in her court. And now Pi’s diabolical, vegetal presence is a part of his everyday life, so there’s that to keep his chops in order. But this is a weird friend dynamic—a weird buddy dynamic—and that’s pretty alien to him. 

> _“Do you know what they will do to me when they learn of this?”  
>  — Svetlana Renkov, Need to Know (6 x 03)_

* * *

This is all a weird dynamic. He doesn’t have much experience with this stuff. Weird dynamics, yes. Martha Rodgers is obviously Weird Dynamic royalty and he spent his formative years in her court. And now Pi’s diabolical, vegetal presence is a part of his everyday life, so there’s that to keep his chops in order. But this is a weird friend dynamic—a weird _buddy_ dynamic—and that’s pretty alien to him. 

The boys had been great at first. They’d made a point of their _Halo_ nights and every-once-in-a-while drinks. Even Lanie came a long for those a couple of times. They’d all made a show of consoling him in his involuntary part-time bachelorhood, and between the lines was the message that they are friends—that he is not just Beckett’s nemesis, friend, boyfriend, fiancé, but rather they are all, collectively, friends. 

DC changed something. He’d like to think it was the book tour before that—that they had just fallen out of sync, and maybe they’d need a few nights yelling at the big screen or the dart board or some stupid action movie, and they’d find their manly groove again. But he thinks it was really DC. 

There were certainly some chafed feelings, and belatedly he gets that. It’s not just that he used them—or even that he could have inadvertently put them in danger by roping them into the case. He thinks it might be that he used them to try to worm his way into Beckett’s new life, and he sees know how that might have made _them_ feel like second-class friends. He is used to doing the worrying on that front, at least with guy friends—at least with buddies. 

He almost _hopes_ it’s DC that’s responsible for the weird dynamic. If it’s DC, then this, too, shall probably pass. If it’s not DC, then maybe this is just the end of the line. Maybe it’s worse than weird, and the thought is beyond depressing. It’s miserable, though that may be the Martha Rodgers School of Weird Drama talking. 

He’s getting the second-class friend treatment. He is currently having his calls declined on live television and getting clotheslined by strategically deployed crime scene tape. He is currently coming in a distant second to _Sully_ , a real-life Pigpen, liberated from the funny pages, and that doesn’t feel great.

And all of that is before Beckett shows up and he kind of feels like he’s ditching his summer friends for his full-time _best_ friend. There is guilt there. There is awkwardness and—really guys?—loyalty tests, and he just has not logged enough hours with long-term friends to really navigate this. He certainly never logged enough teenage hours to navigate this, and aren’t guy friends—buddies—supposed to make allowances for full-time best friends who let you see them naked? 

No, actually, he supposes not. He does a mental review of classic teenage buddy movies, and full-time naked best friends are generally a source of contention. But they’re not teenagers. They are—chronologically, at least—adults, and it seems like they should be able approach all this like adults. 

Except it’s hard, isn’t it? With the boys feeling left behind and Beckett all too aware that her new and necessary loyalties are the furthest thing from popular, it’s hard. With the work and the chosen family and the friendships all mixed up, it’s just _hard_. 

They turn a corner when Beckett presses the thumb drive into his hand. It’s more than a gesture, it’s a reaffirmation of who she really is. It’s confirmation that she hasn’t ditched them all for her cool new summer friends, and there are hugs all around when it’s time for her to head back to his place for some well-earned, full-time-best-friend-naked fun. 

Except that never comes to pass, because who she is, apparently, is incompatible with her cool new summer friends. She hasn’t treated her new loyalties as necessary enough, and it’s over just like that. Her dream job—which might not have lived up to its initial hype, but remained her team job nonetheless—is over, and if he’d had any lingering doubt about how full and whole-hearted his support of Operation FBI had been, it is extinguished in the rage and devastation that rises up in him as McCord’s words die away. 

He wants to go after the woman, literally and metaphorically. He wants to grab her by the collar of her totally obvious secret agent rain coat and ask her how she lives with herself. He wants to ask her if she has any idea what she’s tossing aside. 

But the door closes on Rachel McCord. The door closes on that painfully short-lived phase of Beckett’s life. She is in shock, and he is there propping her up. He is there with his silence until she tells him she needs something else. But she doesn’t need something else right now. She’s in shock, so he holds her. He holds her tight and thinks of the boys. He thinks of Lanie and he’s bleakly grateful for them. He’s bleakly grateful to know that all sins and slights will be forgiven, and when she needs them—when she is ready to need them—it won’t be a weird dynamic at all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: High school shenanigans—not a thing. 


	4. Cosset—Number One Fan (6 x 04)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is not the mother hen in this relationship. No one within a one-hundred-mile radius of him gets to be the mother hen, least of all her. She is the one who hangs back, who is afraid to intrude. She is the one who has a styrofoam temple in her refrigerator and subsists on candy and coffee. She is the one who forgets to floss and who thinks she can leap tall buildings in a single bound, and he is the one who fusses, who anticipates all the ways she’ll fall shorten taking care of herself, and he takes care of her instead. 

> _“The goal is to get in and get out, you understand?”_   
>  _— Sergeant Roman, Number One Fan (6 x 04)_

* * *

She is not the mother hen in this relationship. No one within a one-hundred-mile radius of him gets to be the mother hen, least of all her. She is the one who hangs back, who is afraid to intrude. She is the one who has a styrofoam temple in her refrigerator and subsists on candy and coffee. She is the one who forgets to floss and who thinks she can leap tall buildings in a single bound, and he is the one who fusses, who anticipates all the ways she’ll fall short of taking care of herself, and he takes care of her instead. 

Tonight—right now—she thinks she has to be the mother hen. They’ve both lost track of the hours. Between the day-long ordeal with Emma Riggs and a protracted, massive celebration at The Old Haunt, it is late. Or it might be early. They have both been run ragged, and the cause for celebration is, in its own emotional punch-packing way, at least as exhausting as the anxiety of him taking up being a hostage as hobby. They have lost all track of time, and a mutual aid shower and bed are the only things on her mind or his. 

But it’s not to be. Alexis and Martha descend on him the moment the door opens. It’s normal enough, or it seems so at first. Martha flutters over the danger he was in and rages over the fact that they had to hear it on the news. 

“The _news,_ Richard,” she declares as if she’s just spotted the Queen wearing white after Labor Day. 

“You should have called, Dad.” Alexis is tone is scolding with not-so-subtle notes of fear and anger.

Castle tries, with limited success, to get a word in. Pi gets lots of words in, because he simply pops in and out of the conversation at random to say utterly nonsensical things, with no regard at all for who might have been speaking or trying to speak. She wonders again why Pi is still sleeping on the couch. She wonders why Pi _and_ the couch haven’t long since been sailing out on to Broome. 

She’s tired and short tempered enough that she’s thinking of heading for her own place. She’s annoyed enough at they way this family dynamic that is cacophonous, even by Castle–Rodgers standards, has punctured her celebratory mood and his that she is strongly inclined to them to sort themselves out. But she catches herself. She’s surprised by her own lighting-quick fuse tonight. She’s surprised until she sees his hand go to his chest. She sees him wince as his head droops, and she is all of a sudden in completely unfamiliar mother hen mode. 

“Do you have a bag out, Castle?” She stomps right over whatever papaya-scented inanity is currently dribbling out of Pi’s mouth. 

“A bag?” he asks, bewildered, but she’s already leading him through the alcove to the bedroom. 

“Just overnight things,” she says in a low voice. “Whatever you don’t already have at my place.” She gives him a gentle shove. “Go on.” 

He goes. She rounds on Martha, Alexis and Pi who’ve been trailing after them. 

“He needs some rest,” she says. 

Martha is the first to react to her flat tone. “Well, of course.” She shakes herself. She looks sheepish. “And your place is—“ She gestures to the grey mats still occupying the floor near the piano—to the perennially untidy pile of Pi’s clothes and blankets and whatever. “Well, it’s just an oasis, comparatively speaking, isn’t it?” 

“But he got _shot!”_ Alexis protests. 

There’s enough of the terrified girl Kate remembers outside the bank just two years ago that she wavers for a moment. She doubts herself and wonders what she’s doing, butting in like this—mother henning all over the place as though she isn’t a rank amateur at it. 

But he appears with his bag, looking tired and grateful. He looks eager to be gone and guilty as hell about it. Plus, Pi is opening his mouth again, and that decides her: She will take this fall. She will be the buttinsky. She will be the mother hen that breaks him out of here right now. 

So she does. She rushes him through careful hugs and low-voiced conversations. She hustles him out the door and into a cab. She helps him gingerly out of his jacket, his shirt, and the rest of his clothes. She brings him an ice pack and some scotch. She stops fussing when he reaches out a hand and pulls her down on to the bed beside him. 

“Thanks,” he says as they lie there with the lights on, staring up at the ceiling. “This is better. Quieter is better.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hijacked by Pi—not what this not thing was supposed to be. Ugh. 


	5. All Hands—Time Will Tell (5 x 05)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He holds out for as long as he can. He paces the loft without bothering to turn on lights as he goes. He unstops one decanter, then the next, then the next, nearly shattering every single one as he drives each cut-crystal stopper back into the neck without pouring himself a single drop. He flings himself on to the recently vacated couch and fiercely tries to convince himself that it’s a silver lining—that having his living room back is a silver lining. 

> _“No nightmarish warnings of dire things to come?”  
>  — Richard Castle, Time Will Tell (6 x 05)_

* * *

He holds out for as long as he can. He paces the loft without bothering to turn on lights as he goes. He unstops one decanter, then the next, then the next, nearly shattering every single one as he drives each cut-crystal stopper back into the neck without pouring himself a single drop. He flings himself on to the recently vacated couch and fiercely tries to convince himself that it’s a silver lining—that having his living room back is a silver lining. 

He tries hard to pull himself together, or at least to keep his roiling black mood contained. He tries to write, which is an absolute laugh. He tries to read. He tries to mope Alexis’s room, but that—predictably—is an absolute disaster. 

It’s so much the same as it was that morning. It’s so much the same as it’s been for fifteen years. Its walls have changed colors and the cast of framed characters hanging from the picture rail has turned over several times. The bed has expanded from a junior to a twin to the queen she has now, but there’s been a fundamental stability to it. 

It has always contained the essence of his serious, responsible, passionate, curious, _Intelligent_ daughter, who has been so much the same since the day she was born. She has been so much the same until she came back from six weeks away, a starry-eyed stranger who seems oblivious to the fact that she picked up a parasite in the jungle. The realization that she seems to have taken so little with her to wherever it is she has gone is painful. It brutally underscores the change in her. It painfully amplifies the chasm between who she has always been and who she is playing at being now. 

_Playing at._

It’s the wrong way to think about this. It’s an _awful_ way to think about it. He knows that even as his pulls the door to her room shut hard enough to judder the frame and send something inside toppling to the floor. It’s the kind of thinking that’s pushed things between them from bad to worse and the instinct still has him in its clutches. He’s on the verge of doing something—he has no idea what, but _something_ —that might well do irreversible damage.

He’s held out as long as he can. He grabs his keys. 

He lets himself in, eventually. There’s quite the drama in the hallway—a one man show where his knuckles come within nanometers of knocking, where his phone hovers over her speed dial number. But the neighbor at the far end of the hall comes home. She catches him lurking, and he makes the quick decision to finally let himself in. 

It’s dark. Buddha’s smile, serene and ineffable in daylight, is sinister in the shadows that gather in the foyer. He takes a giant step, but doesn’t quite manage to miss the creaky floorboard. It lets out an eerie sigh and he winces. He thinks about turning tail and running, but in this state where would he go? What irreversible thing would he do? 

He takes a step and another step. He imagines just crawling into bed with her. He envisions himself shedding his clothes along the way, leaving a trail until he’s … pulling the covers over his head, taking comfort from the nearness of her body—the fact of her. 

She sleeps with a gun. How many times has she told him that? Crawling—unannounced—into bed with her is lunacy, but his feet keep moving forward, until suddenly, her voice wafts down the hall. 

“In here, Castle.” It’s quiet and matter of fact. It’s not teasing or eye-rolling or exasperated, though any or all of those reactions would likely be justified. Instead, her quiet, matter-of-fact voice sounds out again. “It’s okay.” 

The door is half open. The door is never half open, not when she’s inside. He presses his fingers to it, pushing it wide. She’s sitting, cross-legged on her side of the bed. Her hair is scraped up high on her head. There are damp tendrils of it clinging to her neck. She’s wearing a t-shirt and pajama bottoms that clash terribly. She is waiting. 

“Hi,’ he says. He stares down at his shoes. “Sorry.” 

“You don’t have to be sorry.” She starts a gesture, then thinks better of it. She begins again and awkwardly pats the bed next to her. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.” 

She’s smiling, but the words are forlorn. Her eyes skitter away from his after making the briefest of contact. 

His mind rewinds to the argument with himself in the hallway. It rewinds to his key in the lock and Buddha’s sinister smile. No security chain, he realizes. She was waiting. She wasn’t sure he would come. He is losing it. He is very much his own worst enemy right now, and he’s standing on the verge of blowing up his relationship with his daughter—more than he already has. 

The woman he is going to spend his life with, the woman he loves, the woman who is his best friend is sitting, crosslegged and uncertain, on the bed in front of him. 

He stoops clumsily to untie his shoes, to kick them off. He stumbles toward her. He sinks heavily to the bed and crawls his body close to her. He takes her hand and presses her knuckles to his lips. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says in a voice so low, she has to bend nearer to hear him. “But if I did, I would want to talk about it with you.” 

Her breath catches. He feels a wave of tension in her break and wash away into nothing.

“That’s good,” she says. The fingers of her free hand sink into his hair. She traces gentle, random patterns across his scalp. She smells of lavender bubble bath and safe haven. “I’m glad.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Terrible instincts are a thing, but this is about Buddha nd the Creaky Floorboard. Therefore not a thing. 


	6. Brave Companion of the Road—Get a Clue (6 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She heads to the loft with the intention of being there to break his fall. She assumes there is going to be a fall. She can’t tell if that lack of confidence is a failing in a fiancée, or if she gets tough-but-tender points for it. Either way, she heads to the loft. 

> _“And what exactly is the mission of your order?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, Get a Clue (6 x 06)_

* * *

She heads to the loft with the intention of being there to break his fall. She assumes there is going to be a fall. She can’t tell if that lack of confidence is a failing in a fiancée, or if she gets tough-but-tender points for it. Either way, she heads to the loft. 

“Katherine, Darling!” Martha greets her, as always, with her brand of over-the-top warmth that still manages to feel sincere. Tonight, though, she’s looking past Kate. Her brow furrows as the door closing behind her. “Have you finally chained Richard to your desk until he does his fair share of paperwork?” 

“You’d think,” she quips back as she peels off her coat, but there’s something tugging at her attention as she finds a hanger and stows it away. “No, Castle went to see Alexis.” She closes the closet door. “Didn’t he tell you?” 

That’s the something—the nagging suspicion. He didn’t tell Martha he was going. He didn’t make any kind of plan for this. He just … went, and this may be a bigger fall than she was thinking. 

“No, no,” she looks puzzled. “I mean, I tried to get it through that thick skull of his that Alexis is genuinely _furious_ with him, but I hardly thought he was listening.” She shakes her head and lifts a hand to the heavens. “I just wish you had been able to come to that dinner the other night, dear. Richard wouldn’t have dared behave that badly in front of _you_.” 

Kate stops in her tracks. _Been able to come._ The words are like a railroad gate lowering in front of her with unexpected speed. If she had been able to come. She shakes it off. She has to, for the moment. She pastes on a smile and completes her trek across the room to join Martha at the breakfast bar. 

“Wouldn’t behave badly in front of _me?”_ She laughs as she climbs on to a stool. It doesn’t sound _too_ false. She doesn’t think so, anyway. “Oh, the stories I could tell.” 

“Of that I have no doubt.” Martha flips the script in front of her closed. “But these tales of blunder will have to wait for another night. I am done for, this evening.” She slides a wine bottle across the counter toward Kate. “You’ll forgive me for abandoning you bind up our dear boy’s wounds on your own?” 

“I think I can handle it,” she says, though she’s less certain it’s true than when she walked in the door. She absently lifts her cheek to accept Martha’s air kiss. “Goodnight, Martha.” 

Martha disappears up the stairs, leaving her with a sudden urge to busy herself. She contemplates the wine and considers fetching a glass. Honestly, she considers swigging straight from the bottle, which is a pretty good sign she ought to find one of his fancy wine-saver corks to remove the temptation. 

She digs one up. She’s in the process of doing the annoying hold-tight-and-pump move that she never gets right when the door opens. His head is down. His shoulders are hunched. It went badly. That’s upsetting in a way it shouldn’t be. After all, she came here to break his fall. 

“Kate.” It takes him a moment to register her presence. Her name is like a reflex. It takes him a moment after he says it. “You’re here.” 

“I’m here,” she repeats and feels stupid for it. “And I have wine.” She holds up the half-full bottle and feels stupider still for that. 

“No,” he shakes his head. “No, thanks.” 

He’s still standing by the door, coat on. She’s standing in the middle of the kitchen with her awkward stage business. She sets it aside and goes to him. 

“Didn’t go well, huh?” She tries to make the question as gentle as possible as she nudges him out of his coat. 

“It didn’t,” he says, arms dangling helplessly at his sides. “She’s—she’s really mad. She wouldn’t even let me come in.” 

She winces at the thought. He notices. He realizes it’s as bad as he thought it was—it’s probably worse. He deflates even further. She tries to recover. 

“She won’t always be mad, Castle.” She loops her arms around his waist, trying to channel a confidence she’s not really feeling at the moment. Martha’s off-hand comment has well and truly thrown her for a loop, but there’s time enough later to ponder whether she could have been there, should have been there, was invited to be there and missed it. There’s time enough, so she shakes it off. “She loves you and she hates to fight.” 

“Pre-Pi Alexis hated to fight,” he mumbles against her neck. “This one is mean.” 

“Castle.” She pulls back to give him a stern look. “You know this is not all on her.” 

“I know it’s not,” he says miserably. “But can’t we just pretend? Just for a while?” 

“No. I don’t think we can.” She drags her fingers through her hair. “I don’t think _you_ should.” 

“You’re smart.” He sighs and lifts his head slightly to catch her eye. “I should take you everywhere.” 

“Maybe.” She knocks her head against his. She wonders who missed what when, but there’s time enough for that after she breaks his fall, here and now. “Maybe that’s a good idea.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Another Braiin!Poneh hijack. Good thing these are not things 


	7. Minus One—Like Father, Like Daughter (6 x 07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He misses her before he leaves. He misses her before he even hangs up the phone, honestly. Because she gives him shit about inventing an against-the-clock race to save a man from wrongful execution just so he won’t have to look at wedding venues, and he laughs—or he at least lets out the first laugh-like thing since his daughter showed up and Impostor Syndrome set in. She tells him to go, spend time with his daughter and he will—he is, but damn, he misses her already. 

> _“You ever been in love so bad it hurts?”  
> _ _— Lyle Gomez, Like Father, Like Daughter (6 x 07)_

* * *

He misses her before he leaves. He misses her before he even hangs up the phone, honestly. Because she gives him shit about inventing an against-the-clock race to save a man from wrongful execution just so he won’t have to look at wedding venues, and he laughs—or he at least lets out the first laugh-like thing since his daughter showed up and Impostor Syndrome set in. She tells him to go, spend time with his daughter and he will—he is, but damn, he misses her already. 

He misses her on the road to Pennsylvania. Thanks to going on six years of riding shotgun, he’s an old hand at road trip arguments, but this thing with Alexis is _tough_ on the personal front, because how can he show that he’s trying to accept Pi, if he’s not even allowed to _ask_ about Pi? And on the Imposter Syndrome front, every single detail Alexis shares smacks of a guy who is guilty, a stand-by-your-man girlfriend who is deluded, and a situation that is going to break his daughter’s heart. 

He misses having her brass-tacks practicality to tug against. He’s supposed to be the one riding shotgun, arguing that Maggie’s belief has to have _something_ to it—that McDonald wouldn’t have take up Frank’s cause if he didn’t think there were holes in the case. He misses—a little bit, and he’s not exactly proud of this—having her there to be the bad guy. He sucks as the bad guy. 

He misses her _sharply_ at the prison. Every word out of Maggie’s mouth is something he might have written in the throes of his most powerful bout of grandiosity. He looks over his shoulder, fully expecting her to be there, rolling her eyes, because that’s a second full-time job for her, and it occurs to him that they should write that into her vows— _to love, honor and roll your eyes at him when he is too disgustingly full of himself to live._

But she isn’t there, and he has to suffer alone. He has to weather Frank’s growing, well-warranted incredulity, which is a piece of cake in comparison to weathering Alexis’s complicated blend of persistent anger at him and absolutely unshakable faith that he can not just solve this thing, but solve it in time. 

She’s there when he calls, though. He’s miserable and panicked about the weight that has just descended on his shoulders, and she picks up after half a ring. She talks him off the ledge and reminds him that all he can do—all anyone can do—is his best. He really _, really_ super-extra-double-fudgey misses her then, and he doesn’t even have time to tell her so before he has to go. 

He misses her when the small town cop sees fit to accost him and Alexis as they scour through files at a coffee shop. He has the absurd urge to surge to his feet and tell the man just how badly his fiancée could beat him up— _would_ beat him up—because there’s not a lot in this world that she hates more than a cop who half-asses his way to what seems like an obvious solution. 

He misses her as he lies awake on the astonishingly squishy double bed in the Hotel That Time Forgot. He’s the one who insisted that they needed to knock off for a few hours of sleep, that they had to keep sharp, and here he is, lying awake. He thinks about Damian Westlake. He thinks about Bob Weldon and the shining beacon of conviction he becomes when he’s decided he knows someone. He wants to pull the covers over his head and call her, despite the hour. He wants to apologize for putting her through this theater of unshakable faith. He wants to apologize for always making her be the bad guy—the one who has to point out how reliably it happens that the most obvious, most soul-crushing explanation is the right one. 

The night ticks on, and want becomes need. He’s overwhelmed by how much he misses her. He knows he shouldn’t give in. He knows this is mostly a familiar kind of middle-of-the-night mania and all the things he has to say will keep. He _knows_ , but he’s still tugging on his jeans as silently as he can. He’s still taking exaggerated cartoon steps across the room to the sliding glass door and stepping out into the chill of an early November night. 

He stalls. He tries to keep the inevitable at arms’s length by checking the weather on his phone—forty degrees, just like the night Kim Tolbert was murdered. The grim overlap has him tugging the the glass door shut tight to keep his daughter safe and warm on the other side as he stupidly freezes with his bare feet on concrete. He contemplates the weird little dog house just outside the office and counts the cars in the parking lot. He contemplates the buzz of the sodium lights. He fixates on every other sensation until he can’t stave it off any longer. 

She answers on half a ring. _“Castle?”_ Her voice is clear and alert. No fog of sleep clings to it. He feels a pang of guilt—a throb of relief and gratitude. “ _Do you have something?”_

“Nothing,” he says. “I’m sorry. Nothing. I just—“ He contemplates the weird little dog house. He cranes to look over his shoulder, through the glass to where his daughter lies sleeping, all the faith in the world locked inside her. “I miss you. I just really miss you.” 

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. There’s the sound of her breath catching in her throat. He braces for her to be annoyed with him. Hell, she _should_ be annoyed with him. Instead, she lets out a sigh. _“I miss you, too, Castle.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The weird little dog house is a thing, but as ever, this is about no things. Certainly not the weird little dog house. 


	8. Heavy Lifting—A Murder Is Forever (6 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ghost of Alice Clark lingers. She is, in context, an odd candidate for haunting. They swim in a sea of people who have died violently, and Alice Clark doesn’t particularly pop on the tragedy front, on the unfinished business front. In context, she doesn’t. 

> _“Are we really going to dance this dance again?”  
>  — Barrett Hawke, A Murder Is Forever (6 x 08)_

* * *

The ghost of Alice Clark lingers. She is, in context, an odd candidate for haunting. They swim in a sea of people who have died violently, and Alice Clark doesn’t particularly pop on the tragedy front, on the unfinished business front. In context, she doesn’t. 

Except maybe she does by association. The two of them were fighting when the phone rang and summoned them to the parking garage—to the destroyed car beneath a destroyed office—containing the body of the not-quite-therapist to the rich and famous. And it’s her professional identity that comes back to haunt them. It comes back to her—Kate—specifically. 

Ryan is carrying around the book, clutched to his sweater vest, as Ryan sometimes does when he gets enthusiastic. Esposito is taunting him about it, as Esposito _always_ does. She gets in on the taunting fun, taking care to make it look like she is the exasperated grown-up who is so very _above_ their juvenile nonsense. 

Castle isn’t there at the start of it. He must be getting their coffee from the place she likes that’s a little bit out of the way, and she smiles to herself, pleased by the fact that the gesture indicates that he’s still appropriately grateful for the night she spent on his side of the bed, guarding against recently displaced lions who might be bearing a grudge—he’s still appropriately contrite for being more than a little emotionally tone deaf about Linus in the first place. 

He’s not there until she is genuinely _is_ done with Ryan and Esposito’s nonsense, which has gone on far too long and gotten far too ridiculous. Esposito has snatched the book away. He’s holding it out of his partner’s sweater-vested reach and still managing to read choice quotes aloud. The joke is played out, she’s not enjoying the Middle School Bully and His Victim visuals, and all she needs is for Gates to materialize and see that it’s _her_ team running around, acting like fools. 

But it’s not Gates who materializes, it’s him, and each hand is occupied by a steaming hot cup from the place she likes that’s a little out of the way. He materializes just as she raises her voice to its Mom Isn’t Playing Anymore, Children volume and she says … something about Alice Clark and what a hack she was. She says something she can’t quite remember—she will never quite be able to remember—about rich jackasses with invented problems paying charlatans for “couples therapy” before their aging trophy wives take them for half. 

So she might remember some of what she says. She might remember there are heavy air quotes and plenty of sarcasm to go around. But mostly what she remembers is that he hears all of it and his face goes carefully blank for a count of five, and then that carefully blank expression is replaced by good cheer that’s turned all the way up to eleven. She remembers the ghost of Alice Clark tapping her on the shoulder and giving her a Cheshire Cat smirk. 

Nothing comes of it all day. Esposito gives Ryan his book back and even manages—with prompting from her that bleeds well over the line nto threat—a mumbled apology. Ryan tucks the book into a desk drawer and is mostly successful in _not_ spouting quotable quotes from Alice at the first sign of a conversational lull. 

And he is fine. Castle is _fine_ , and maybe she imagined that carefully blank moment. Maybe he didn’t hear her, and even if he did hear, maybe nothing about it struck a painful chord. Maybe. But the ghost of Alice Clark says different. The ghost of Alice Clark points out that she’s a lousy writer, so it’s not her deathless prose that drew him to speed-read her latest, it’s the lure of the content—the secret to relationship bliss.

She thinks about the seashells—their seashells, which he carefully saved—and about Linus, awaiting his hoisting up on to some different wall. She thinks about trying to keep a straight face as he, with a very definitely straight face, talked about alphas and territory and the two of them defining it together. 

She’s preoccupied by her tremendous foot-in-mouth moment it all day long. She swings wildly between defensive snappishness and being and overly solicitous of him. He’s giving her more or less constant sidelong looks, and well he might. She’s weird and constantly on the verge of apologizing for—she doesn’t even know what. For a perfectly warranted distaste for common sense dressed up as pop psychology and marketed to hell and back? For a fair assessment of Alice Clark and her clientele? She has no idea, but that doesn’t stop her from being constantly on the verge of apologizing. 

She has it under better control by the time they’re knocking off for the night. She _thinks_ she finally has her weird, amorphously apologetic mood under control, but she’s easing into the left turn lane and waiting for a long light when he suddenly says, “It was family therapy.” He’s looking up and to the right, out the passenger-side window at the waxing moon. “And she was a charlatan. A different kind of charlatan than Alice.” He turns to give her a rueful smile. “And I guess I was a jackass.” 

“Family therapy,” she repeats. She curses under her breath. “Alexis.” 

“Alexis. Yeah.” He nods. He gives a matter-of-fact shrug. “Had to try.” 

“Trying is good.” It’s a stupid thing to say. She goes hot from her hairline to her collar bones, but the light changes and she can’t manage this conversation and a left turn in Manhattan traffic. She’s not that kind of multitasker. 

She doesn’t have to manage it, though. He reaches across the console between them and tugs at her right hand until she releases the wheel and lets him thread his finger through hers. “Trying is always good.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The world clamoring for an explanation for Castle’s addiction to bad pop psychology—not at all a thing.


	9. Standpoint—Disciple (6 x 09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His favorite thing—well, one of his favorite things—about shacking up with Kate Beckett is the fact that he’s privy to the behind-the-scenes magic. He gets to watch the struggle she undertakes every morning with hair that devolves into anarchy overnight. He gets to be on hand for the transformation from cheeks, forehead, and chin criss-crossed with pillow-case creases to the flawlessly, effortlessly made-up visage she presents to the world. He gets to be on hand until she slams the bathroom door in his face because he’s being a pest. 

> _“How does a wire that thin not snap?”  
>  — Richard Castle, Disciple (6 x 09)_

* * *

His favorite thing—well, one of his favorite things—about shacking up with Kate Beckett is the fact that he’s privy to the behind-the-scenes magic. He gets to watch the struggle she undertakes every morning with hair that devolves into anarchy overnight. He gets to be on hand for the transformation from cheeks, forehead, and chin criss-crossed with pillow-case creases to the flawlessly, effortlessly made-up visage she presents to the world. He gets to be on hand until she slams the bathroom door in his face because he’s being a pest. 

She’s been slamming the bathroom door in his face a lot lately, and he’s not sure it has anything to do with him being a pest. It’s less of a slam and more of a somber shove, for one thing. _Castle. Please,_ she’ll say in a tight, tired voice, and he’ll yield, because he’s used to tussling with her. He’s used to getting her dander up. But when she stands there with her shoulder against the bathroom door he’s afraid lately that she’s about to cry. 

It’s a possibility that makes his teeth rattle in their sockets, because he knows what this is. He knows it’s Kelly Nieman and every one of her nerve-twanging comments on the perfection of her face. It’s cheek implants in a plexiglass dish and hours of Lanie’s life lost to a blackout and God knows what. It is a soft-spoken Georgia boy transformed into a New York cop by a stretch of dialogue that’s twenty-five seconds long. Every one of these invasions has slipped beneath her skin. Every single one of them has taken up residence in her face. 

She rushes in the mornings now. She is every bit as breathtaking—and not just because she wakes up breathtaking, pillow-case creases notwithstanding. She is every bit as put together as ever, but she rushes. She pulls off the magic trick that is public-facing Kate Beckett as though every day she is trying to beat her personal best. She shoes him out of the bathroom—she shuts the door on him—whether he’s being a pest or not. 

Once she is out in the world for the day, she sneaks glances at herself in windows as they walk from car to crime scene, in the scarred plexiglass of bus shelters, in the shining chrome of the break room toaster. She sneaks glances, and in the moments when she doesn’t look like she might put her fist through whatever reflective surface is closest, she looks like she might cry. 

She won’t talk about it, of course. Or maybe it’s not so “of course.” He hasn’t made much of an effort to get her to talk about it, if he’s honest. If he looks at his behavior in the world where Carl Matthews has run several good pens dry and filled his several pads of paper, he’s mostly been trying to get his foot in the bathroom door. He’s mostly been focused on reclaiming his backstage pass for the magic show, and it’s possible that sucks. 

He just doesn’t want to fight with her about bullet-riddled bodies falling from great heights into frigid water. He doesn’t want to fight with her at all about his theory or her theory or neither theory, because the world sure does seem to churn out the likes of Carl Matthews. 

He just doesn’t want to fight with her at all. He wants to be there for her. He wants the two of them to be there for Lanie and for Esposito and for Ryan who might not have gotten to play the dead body double game but still suffers the weight of every one of Jerry Tyson’s victims, known or suspected. 

But he needs to do more than just not fight with her—or to _only_ fight with her about the damned bathroom door. She needs him to do more.

He’s not sure what _more_ looks like until he accidentally barges in to the bathroom and finds her leaning on the counter, her heavy palms planted wide. She’s not crying, but her shoulders heave up and down with he effort of her breath. He sees her trying to lift her chin, to face her own image in the mirror. 

“Kate,” he says, his voice as tentative as the hand he lifts toward her. “Kate, I—“ 

“I’m fine,” she cuts him off, her voice thick. She cranes to look at him over her shoulder. She avoids the mirror, with his reflection and hers not quite side-by-side. “I’m really—“

“You’re not.” He eases his way up behind her. He cups her shoulders and breathes in the scent of the curve of her neck. “You don’t have to be …” He trails off. He has a sudden, stupid idea. “Wait here,” he says, although she is quite clearly going nowhere. 

He has to rifle through his desk. He has to rifle through box after box behind and around his desk until he finds them. He slips them on—stupid black plastic glasses with their cardboard lenses—their hypnotic red swirl with a tiny cut out in the center of each one, not quite as big as a pencil tip. He navigates by touch back to the bathroom and throws open the door. 

She laughs. Thankfully she laughs, though her head is in her hands and she’s leaning against the low wall of the shower stall. “What?” She peers up at him again, this time through her fingers, as though she can’t quite believe what she’s seen. “What are you _doing_ , Castle?” 

He slips the glasses off. He walks toward her, holding them out. He slips them on her face and turns her by the shoulders to face the mirror. “I’m showing you, Kate.” He turns her by the shoulders to face the mirror. She tries to look away. He gently nudges her chin back to center. “I’m showing you what I see.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Revived X-Ray Spex—not a thing. I’ll see myself out. 


	10. Chestnut—The Good, the Bad, and the Baby (6 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Johanna Beckett was not inclined to use clichés. Jim Beckett is even less so. And yet, throughout her whole life, each one of them separately—both of them together—have told and do tell her that having a kid changes you. 

> _“How can you be logical in the face of that face?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, The Good, The Bad and the Baby (6 x 10)_

* * *

Johanna Beckett was not inclined to use clichés. Jim Beckett is even less so. And yet, throughout her whole life, each one of them separately—both of them together—have told and do tell her that having a kid changes you. 

_Treacle and nonsense, Katie. I know what I sound like, but it’s true._ Her mother had said it a hundred times, in moments of fondness and in flashes of anger, in the slow burn of exasperation and all through a lifetime of soul-gnawing worry, _It changes you_ , her mother had said a hundred times. 

Her dad sounds shell-shocked when he says it. He sounds awed, and very occasionally still exhausted from her teenage years. _You think you’re a sensible person—rational and collected. You make your living by talking. You think “How hard can it be?” And here comes little Katie Beckett with the money for an honest-to-Pete motorcycle, and now what?_ He shakes his head. He always shakes his head. _It does, Katie. It changes you._

Martha has told her the same. They’re insomnia buddies some nights, when Castle is writing and oblivious, or when he’s writing and his sense of time becomes detached from the rest of the world. When he is in bed and dead to the world, and she is in bed renewing her acquaintance with the ceiling, she’ll sometimes throw off the covers and pad her way out into the living room, the kitchen, the table in front of the gas fire, and she Martha will sip tea. They’ll sneak a little bourbon into their mugs, and Martha, in her inimitable, theatrical way, elevates the same sentiment above cliché. 

_You walk the floor. You feel—Katherine, you can actually_ feel _the wrinkles forming as every sleep-deprived second passes. And then he settles,_ she lifts her palms to the heavens, _he_ settles _in your arms and looks up at you with those blue eyes and all the misplaced trust in the world, and it is truly like nothing else on earth._ She pauses. She tips her head to the side and gestures with her mug. _Except maybe the good stuff._ And they laugh. Together, they laugh, but even Martha smiles quietly to herself and adds, _It changes you_. 

He has told her in a hundred ways from the first moment she met and hated him, met and had her curiosity piqued by the paradox of the unrepentant, irredeemable pain-in-the-ass man child and the devoted father with an obviously more-than-functional daughter. 

And he has told her outright. Under the worst of circumstances, with his entire world on the verge of shattering, he has told her about the moment he knew his life would never been the same—that he would never be the same. _Like I’d been struck by lightning,_ he’d said, speaking of clichés… 

So she knows. She _knows_ in the way an ambitious woman, north of thirty, and committed to a high-stress, high-risk profession _knows._ She knows in the way that woman north of thirty—who is in no real hurry to play that role, who has never been a baby person—knows, because God knows every last person on the planet is wont to rush up and tell you— _Hey, did you know having a kid changes you? Were you_ aware _of this breaking news?_

So she absolutely knows. She is absolutely aware. Except she doesn’t know at all. She has not known up until this night, up until this moment, as he hands the newly clean, newly snug, newly content Cosmo over to her, and the crook of her arm is ready. She pulls the warmth of his wriggling little body into her chest and the two of them, together, watch Castle disposing of the rather disgusting evidence of Cosmo’s recent crimes. 

Except he’s not Castle, he’s Uncle Rick. And this is not her real voice, this is her baby voice—her voice for babies, and she _has_ one. This is not her bad-ass stride or her quick, efficient dash from point to point. This is an odd little two-step that she does for babies—that she does for Cosmo. It’s a distinct point in time—there is before that point, and there is after it, and it’s as if she’s been standing in the close confines of a magician’s cabinet and the sides have fallen suddenly away to reveal her. 

It’s not all warmth and nicknames. It’s not all dancing an odd little two-step with the weight that wriggling little body balanced perfectly in her arms. It is loud and disgusting five times over. It is exhausting and endless. But there is the Kate Beckett before Cosmo and the Kate Beckett afterward. 

It changes you. It really does. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Babies are not magic. This is not a thing. 


	11. Pity & Fear—Under Fire (6 x 11)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He remembers the first time he faced a world without her in it. Not the first time he faced his world without her in it, though he didn’t understand the difference until he stood on the street, paralyzed by the explosion’s shockwave. He remembers taking her into his home just when a loud and dying part of himself clamored to back away, to detach, to protect himself. He remembers the flat voice of his inner monologue telling him that particular emotional horse had long since left the barn.

> _“Rescue Seven, what’s your status?”  
> _ _— Chief Miller, Under Fire (6 x 11)_

* * *

He remembers the first time he faced a world without her in it. Not the first time he faced _his_ world without her in it, though he didn’t understand the difference until he stood on the street, paralyzed by the explosion’s shockwave. He remembers taking her into his home just when a loud and dying part of himself clamored to back away, to detach, to protect himself. He remembers the flat voice of his inner monologue telling him that particular emotional horse had long since left the barn.

He remembers the moment before he knew it was John Raglan’s blood, not her own, fanning up the neck of her white sweater, and the moment when he knew that Hal Lockwood had her in his sites and something nearly superhuman propelling him toward the man, propelling his fist into that pathologically calm face. He remembers Mike Royce, dead in an alley and her asking—challenging him to speak the truth— _Castle, if it was me lying there would you just walk away?_

He remembers her dying not long after. Once, twice in that ambulance, the world was without her, and as soul-searingly painful as it was to be without her those long months after, he at least knew she was in the world. He at least knew that, and the flat voice of his inner monologue wondered if they might not go looking for that emotional horse—if he might not back away, detach, protect himself after all. 

He remembers wondering that yet again not even a year later. He remembers saying it out loud—that he was done, that it was over, that he would not watch her throw her life away. He remembers the sheer exhaustion as he faced a lifetime of reminding himself every hour of every day that it was immaterial to him if she was in the world or not. The flat voice of his inner monologue had had some choice words about that. 

It’s a strange journey he’s taking along the winding thread of this kind of memory. He is, when he remembers, nursing his flute of the champagne they had popped in honor of Sarah Grace when they finally stumbled through the door together, each of them leaning on a body at least as exhausted as their own. 

She is nursing hers in the tub. She is soaking the acrid smell of smoke from her skin. She is, no doubt, scrubbing it away while tears drop carelessly into the steaming water. She’ll cry with him later. They will cry together for all that they nearly lost—all that Lanie and Jenny, and that beautiful, funny-looking little baby nearly lost. They’ll tremble together in the dark, but for the moment—for this first wave—she needs her space. 

She doesn’t have all the practice he’s had at this. She lives with every terrible scar of concrete loss. She has occupied for more than a third of her life a world from which her mother is irrevocably gone, from which Royce and Roy Montgomery are irrevocably gone. And she’s a cop. The possibility of loss Is omnipresent for her. She has the necessary mental blast doors to keep herself upright, moving forward, doing the job. 

But she doesn’t have practice he’s had grieving for what could have happened. She hasn’t had to settle in for real talk with the flat voice of her inner monologue about having chosen a lifetime of this—a lifetime spent weathering these terrible _almost_ s. A lifetime spent grateful for the privilege, because every time she walks through the door at night, relatively unscathed, is a moment of profound grace. 

He takes another sip of champagne, surprised to find that it’s bordering on warm and he’s not close to finished with the short pour he’d settled on, because he can tell that the flat voice of his inner monologue is gearing up for some intense chat and he doesn’t exactly need any depressants at the moment. 

He pushes himself up out of the chair. He doesn’t bother to check his watch as he slips it off and sets it on the nightstand. The champagne clock is accurate enough for him. He’s careless with this clothes, stripping them off as he goes. He sinks, naked, to the edge of the tub and reaches for the hand that rises to hide her tears. He presses a kiss to her palm. 

“I don’t even know why I’m crying.” She lets out a throaty, self-conscious laugh. “Ryan is fine. Esposito is fine. Everyone is—“ she chokes out. She presses a fist to her forehead. “I don’t know why—“ 

“I do.” He steps carefully into the tub. He slides into the water alongside her. He gathers her to him. “It’s okay. I know why.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Inner monologue. Castle obviously does not have one. Ergo, Not A Thing. 


	12. Coaster—Deep Cover (6 x 12)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn’t blame him for everything that goes down surrounding the murder of Ted Rollins. Well. She blames him at first. He lied to her. He risked her case, her collar, her victim’s right to justice. But she gets it, mostly. She understands what drove him, and ultimately, she doesn’t blame him. But she’ll accept his contrition. 

> _“You’ve stitched yourself up before, I take it?”  
> _ _— Martha Rodgers, Deep Cover (6 x 12)_

* * *

She doesn’t blame him for everything that goes down surrounding the murder of Ted Rollins. Well. She blames him at first. He _lied_ to her. He risked her case, her collar, her victim’s right to justice. But she gets it, mostly. She understands what drove him, and ultimately, she doesn’t blame him. But she’ll accept his contrition. 

She’ll accept out of pure self-interest, for one thing. A contrite Richard Castle is an attentive Richard Castle. There are breakfasts in bed. There are scheduled massages at night when she’s less likely to be called away. There are unscheduled foot rubs when she can spare the time during business hours, and delicious drive-by work on her shoulders, her neck, and all those little bastard muscles at the base of her skull. 

There is well-behaved forbearance all the way through the movies _she_ wants to watch and more of the same as they drag around to possible wedding venues and vendors, as they try to tackle the calendar and everything else that keeps arguing forcefully for elopement. The contrition list goes on and on. There are a hundred thoughtful little gestures when he’s contrite, and she thinks it’s funny that he never goes big when he’s really sorry for something. He never tries to wipe it out with some grand gesture. 

She’ll also accept his contrition because it seems like he needs it. He’s reckoning with more than she thinks he knows, and she finds herself in the awkward position of wondering if it wouldn’t do him some good to talk to someone about it. Burke and this round of therapy—this ongoing round—have helped her immeasurably, but she still foolishly has trouble thinking of herself as a “therapy” person. 

She, perhaps even more foolishly, has trouble thinking of _him_ as a therapy person, even though she knows that there’s an element of performance in his doggedly optimistic disposition, his resilience. And then, of course, there’s the fact that she has no idea what kind of person he _could_ talk to, given the circumstances. She has no idea how a mostly redacted therapy session would even work. 

But he’s dealing with complicated things—his own disjointed childhood and the draw of not just a father, a father who is a _spy._ He’s dealing with the art-unconciously-imitates-life of it all, and he’s dealing with unforeseen nightmares attached. This man—his absent father—has now twice brought danger and bloodshed to his doorstep. This man has recklessly tipped his identity and subjected his own granddaughter to unspeakable trauma. He has put Martha through an experience that has been harrowing, even for the great diva. He has used the two of them as bait and casually executed a man in cold blood right in front of him. 

Contrition seems to help with it—the guilt he feels for wanting a father, for wanting him to be honorable, for wanting to play spy—so she decides that she’ll take it, for a while, anyway. But it gets to be longer than a while. Days become weeks. It’s going on a month, and he’s still doing her laundry, waiting on her hand and foot, trying to make it up to her. She’s had enough. He’s done enough. It’s time for the end of contrition, but she’s not exactly sure how to get them there. 

She thinks about counter-gestures—about beating him out of bed in the morning and bringing him breakfast, but he’s a plotter. Even if she’s managed to be up before him, the minute her weight shifts on the bed, he springs up, pulls some kind of cartoon lever, and deploys some pre-arranged plan. She tries to gather up his laundry—or even her own—but he somehow keeps the hampers constantly empty. 

The answer, paradoxically, is a grand gesture on her part. It dawns on her as she’s popping into her mouth the last plump blackberry from another perfect breakfast in bed. The plan comes to her, fully formed. 

“Get dressed,” she commands, as she sets aside the tray pinning her legs to the bed. “Something warm,” she adds, looking out the window at the thin winter sun. 

“The bed is warm,” he notes with a waggle of his eyebrows. “And your shoulders look tense—“ 

He reaches for her, seductively, but she slaps his hand away. “Enough,” she says. “Castle, it’s enough. Let’s go.” 

“Where?” he asks, as he trails after her. 

He asks a dozen times—a hundred times—as they shower, they dress, they get to the car. He asks a dozen times more—a hundred times—on the drive that takes longer than she’d like. He keeps asking, even after it’s absolutely clear where they must be going. 

He falls silent, though, when they get there. He lets her take his hand and tug him all through the park until they’re standing beneath the clattering wooden track with its red train full of shrieking passengers. 

“We ride,” she tells him solemnly. “Front car. Hands up. And then it’s done. You let it go.” 

He nods. He doesn’t say anything. He holds her hand tight as they work their way through the lines, as they wait for the front car. He doesn’t say anything until they’re at the top of the highest drop. Then he opens his mouth. He howls. He lets it go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Roller coasters in the dead of winter. Definitely not a thing. 


	13. Proprium—Limelight (6 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s never regretted his past. He has a million reasons why, in his whole life, he has truly never regretted his past, beginning with the truly superficial: His past was a hell of a lot of fun. 

> _“Do you ever look back on something you’ve done and it’s like somebody else is doing it?”  
> _ _— Alexis Castle, Limelight (6 x13)_

* * *

He’s never regretted his past. He has a million reasons why, in his whole life, he has truly never regretted his past, beginning with the truly superficial: His past was a hell of a lot of _fun_. 

He’d discovered early the need for transgression—not just the willingness to transgress, but as the scholarship kid who needed constantly to demonstrate his right to exist at this boarding school, at that prep school, he had learned to lead others into transgression. He was the laugh riot, the total lunatic, now recruiting those who were up for absolutely anything. It had its consequences, but it was _fun._

And then came a modicum of fame, and that first little burst of wealth. There was Kyra, then, and maybe he regrets that a little. She was an anchoring, tempering force, and maybe it’s more accurate to say he’s embarrassed by that. He’s embarrassed at the cliché of needing a good woman to keep him from complete excess. 

And then there _wasn’t_ Kyra. Kyra was gone, but he’d learned not to be _quite_ so stupid with his money, and that still left over quite a tidy Transgression Fund, and Richard Castle picked up where little Ricky Rodgers had left off, and he really doesn’t regret any of that—not even the police horse, though possibly he regrets things in his permanent medical record born of the unwise decision to ride his mighty loaner stallion truly bareback. 

He doesn’t regret Meredith—even without taking into consideration that he could never regret the relationship that gave him his daughter, he doesn’t actually regret the high-profile volatility of it. He doesn’t regret straightening himself up and remaking his image into something much more kid friendly when it became clear that Meredith was neither going to remake her image _nor_ become more kid friendly. He doesn’t regret the stiff, cultivated Gina years any more than he regrets the release valve years in between. 

He has always believed this narrative of himself—his regret-free legend—but current events seem to be shaking its foundation. Mandy Sutton shakes its foundation, because she is a hot, miserable mess. But she’s also a familiar mess, to a point, at least. 

He’s searching back through the young woman’s recent and not-so-recent true tales of hangovers and trashed hotel rooms for the case and for himself—and also so he doesn’t have to write Pi’s impossible recommendation. He’s searching back, and all of it rings a bell. He sees in the photos and the clipped, angry quotes how unhappy Mandy Sutton was, has been, is, and he remembers with sudden and startling fidelity, what it was like to be that lonely, to be always falling forward into the next messed up moment. 

It’s worse for her. His projection or nostalgia or whatever it is goes only so far. It’s exponentially worst for Mandy because she’s exponentially more famous, because she doesn’t have even the daffy, intermittent support of Martha Rodgers, she has a personal assistant and a mother whose made herself into a distant work friend. She has skeevy exes coming out of the woodwork, and it’s another cliché, but the Jesse Joneses of the world are always going to be more of a nightmare than the Merediths, the Ginas, and so on. 

He’s caught up in empathy for Mandy Sutton that surprises him in how far beyond nostalgia it goes, how far beyond any kind of extended paternal feeling for this young woman who is just a few years older than his own daughter. He’s caught up in something that might be belated regret for the years he spent emotionally treading water—transgressing to keep everyone’s expectations low, not least of all his own. 

He’s so caught up that he misses whatever it is that Ryan and Esposito are laughing over as they come strolling into the break room. He hears _Beckett_ and _Facebook_ and _Dad_. He might hear _Aunt_ someone or other, but he’s distracted. His mind isn’t on the two of them, until it is—until the name of Aunt someone or other resolves in his mind—Aunt Theresa who has memorized every scandalous act he has ever committed and several he has _not_ committed. Aunt Theresa who hates him. He puts the pieces together. 

“Beckett was talking to her dad?” He twists around on the to face the boys and nearly tips over backward. 

Ryan has the good grace to look a little sheepish, but Esposito finds it all hilarious. “Oh, yeah, Castle! Your fling with your ex-wife? That’s _all_ over the Beckett net.” 

He closes the lid of his laptop with key-crunching force. He leaves it sitting on the high top and goes in search of her. She’s at her desk, her pen moving furiously over a legal pad. She’s engrossed, but he risks interrupting. He feels suddenly like he has to. 

“I’m sorry about the _Page 6_ thing.” He sinks into his chair. “Kate. I’m sorry.” 

Her head snaps up. She’s annoyed that he’s interrupted her train of thought, or she is about to be annoyed by that, but she sees that he’s serious. She sees that his regret is sincere and takes a breath to clear as much of it from her voice as she can. 

“Castle. I don’t seriously think you were gazing lovingly at your ex-wife.” She gestures at the spread of paparazzi photos of Mandy fanned across her desk. “It’s not your fault tabloid journalism and gossip columns exist.” 

“No,” he says, “But my past … who I was. Anything they write about me is plausible. And it’s not just about me anymore. It’s about you, too.” He’s casting about for the words to convey this strange state of mind he’s in. “And I’m sorry for that.” 

She’s giving him an odd look, but she snakes her hand across the desk and gives his fingers a discreet squeeze. “Hey. Don’t be, okay? Who you are now. That’s what matters.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Castle. Introspection. Super not a thing. 


	14. Aeronaut—Dressed to Kill (6 x 14)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You didn’t want to fight Nicole Kidman to the death.” He turns from the sizzling pan on the stove, the one he should be attending to. He snaps the tongs in his Eureka! moment. “The photographer for your spread would obviously have seen that you belonged on the cover. In ninety-nine …” He scrunches up his face, doing some kind of math in his head. “That’s post–Eyes Wide Shut, pre-Moulin Rouge, on-the-brink-of-divorce Kidman. She would not have gone quietly, and yet,” he pauses for dramatic effect, “the contest would have been beneath you, so you bowed out.” 

> _“When does it get interesting?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, Dressed to Kill (6 x 14)_

* * *

“You didn’t want to fight Nicole Kidman to the death.” He turns from the sizzling pan on the stove, the one he should be attending to. He snaps the tongs in his _Eureka!_ moment. “The photographer for your spread would _obviously_ have seen that you belonged on the cover. In ninety-nine …” He scrunches up his face, doing some kind of math in his head. “That’s post– _Eyes Wide Shut,_ pre- _Moulin Rouge,_ on-the-brink-of-divorce Kidman. She would not have gone quietly, and yet,” he pauses for dramatic effect, “the contest would have been beneath you, so you bowed out.” 

He turns back toward the stove, satisfied with his latest explanation for the premature death of her modeling career. It’s good news for the bacon, it’s good news for her ability to to enjoy her first cup of coffee in relative peace and quiet. It should be a while before he has some other fanciful tale to explain what he finds absolutely inexplicable, and it’s all _good._

So far, she’s been called away on a secret spy assignment. The call comes at the eleventh hour, so she has to complete the op in full make-up, in platform heels, in a get up some beleaguered designer’s assistant has sewn her into. She’s been sabotaged by sinister agents from Bulgaria or maybe Botswana or possibly Belgium—something _B_ -ish, anyway—who are trying to topple capitalism, starting with the fashion industry. 

She’s shattered every camera lens in photograph’s arsenal with the sheer force of her hotness, with the sublime power of her cheekbones, with the adorable way she wrinkles her nose when she’s frustrated. She has learned of the tragic story of the model who lost the job to her—there’s a sick grandmother and a sick kitten and bills to be paid, so she pretends, Cindy Brady-style, to twist her ankle so the job goes to the needy runner up after all. 

She’s had grand adventures and supernatural encounters in the expansive playground of his imagination, and she’s enjoyed every one. She enjoys his boundless imagination, and of course she enjoys his creative wheedling after every vignette wraps up, and he turns to her and begs for the real story. She enjoys testing the limits of his inventiveness, and a Richard Castle who wants something from her—who is _motivated_ —is a gift not to be relinquished lightly. 

But she’s also shy about telling him—not reluctant, exactly, but _shy_. The true story is set in those last precious months when she still had her mom. It’s set against the backdrop of college tours and growing pains, and how can she explain the feeling of floating up and away from the life that had been hers for eighteen years? She stumbles over the idea even in her own mind, which clings to the metaphor of a hot air balloon rising up and out of control— _I can’t come back. I don’t know how it works!_

And anyway, how can she compete with his tightly plotted thrillers and comedies that run the gamut from fart jokes to such high-brow word play that it takes her days to get all the jokes? Why wouldn’t she want to adopt a lovingly hand-crafted myth by best-selling novelist Richard Castle, when the real story involves sweaty palms and hours of rehearsal just to get out the shortest possible refusal she could deliver without—hopefully—sounding like rudest kind of ingrate?

So she lets him spin his tales. She lets slip a detail here, an oblique reference there when it seems like his interest has waned—or, more likely, when he thinks that her protracted silence means she really would rather not talk about it—and the maneuver works. It’s like pulling the string on the See ’n Say or feeding quarters to Zoltar the Fortune Teller. He obliges with another story—another episode in her picaresque adventures. 

The maneuver works until the moment it doesn’t. There’s nothing particularly special about it, as far as she can tell. They’re eating again. She’s gotten home late. He’s fixing her a snack while she sits swinging her finally, blissfully bare feet as she perches on a stool at the breakfast bar. 

“Why don’t you want to tell me?” he asks. It’s sudden enough that he stops in the act of pushing the plate of cheese and crackers and grapes across to her. He doesn’t mean it to, but it looks like he’s holding out on her—like her snack is contingent on an answer. Her eyes narrow and he quickly completes the gesture. “Never mind. You don’t have to—“ 

“It’s not that …” She gropes for the words. _Important_ springs to mind first, but that’s not quite true. It _is_ important. Telling Matilda King _No,_ returning to Stanford instead _,_ may be the most important set of choices she made in her young adult life, even if their effects hardly had a chance to travel downstream. But it’s a quiet story. There’s not much to it. “It’s just not that interesting.” 

“It is to me.” He reaches across the counter for her hand. He sweeps a thumb all along her lifeline. “Everything about you is interesting to me.” 

“I don’t know where to start.” She shakes her head. She’s blushing under the force of his raw sincerity—the adoration paired with eagerness. After all this time, she still blushes. 

“Oooh! Let’s start at the end!” He rushes around the counter to pull up the stool next to hers. “A pastiche of flashbacks. We haven’t done that.” He holds up his hands like a director’s viewfinder. “Fade in on Kate Beckett, not yet nineteen. Beautiful, poised, though the drum of her fingers on the arm of her chair betrays her nerves—“ 

“Hey!” She elbows him. “Who’s telling this story?” 

“You. You are most definitely telling this story.” He lands an elbow on the counter. He props a fist against his lips. “Take it away, Detective.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Your periodic reminder that the monstrously awful dress is NOT a. thing. 


	15. Narc—Smells Like Teen Spirit (6 x 15)

> _“Mind if I cut in?”  
>  — Kate Beckett, Smells Like Teen Spirit (6 x 15)_

* * *

Someone has spiked the punch. It’s an entirely ludicrous cliché, but it’s true. The first sign is a pair of stumblers who not only disrupt their slow dance, the girl’s heel lands square in the middle of his foot, and no man’s footwear in the known universe is proof against that. 

The stumblers have her whipping around to scan the gym, eyes narrowed. Next come the gigglers. Everyone, everywhere with a cut-crystal punch cup—because this is Faircroft Prep, where seventeen-year-olds warrant busting out the Waterford—is giggling over said punch cup. 

She strikes out for the table near the enormous, rose be-decked portrait of Madison. He hobbles along in her wake. The fumes burn their eyes while they’re still a good distance away, and when he peers down into the gargantuan bowl, the alcohol-to-punch ratio is so high that the liquid inside is the palest of pinks. 

“It doesn’t smell like cheap vodka,” he offers. The comment is noncommittal. He’s not sure what she is or is not going to want to do about this, but it’s probably no laughing matter. “Of course it _wouldn’t_ be cheap. This is Faircroft Prep, after all.” He takes another sniff of the air “Oh, wait, though. Maybe it’s not vodka at all. Maybe it’s Everclear.”

“It’s Everclear,” she says as she gives him a sidelong, pitying look. The back of his neck goes hot. He suddenly feels like one of the early versions of little Ricky Rodgers suddenly colliding with a very late model Rebel Bex. Rebel Bex has almost certainly spiked a punch bowl or two in her day. Rebel Bex has probably passed around a flask with some of the cool young teachers. Little Ricky Rodgers got a three-day hangover from three sips of a Snow Creek Berry Bartles and Jaymes Wine Cooler. 

“Aren’t there chaperones?” She rises up on her toes in a vain attempt to see over the heads of the giggling, stumbling, punch-swilling crowd. Neither question nor the move is all that Rebel Bexian. 

He’s relieved. Little Ricky Rodgers has no idea what to even _say_ to Rebel Bex, assuming he’d be able to say anything at all. He wouldn’t be all that sad to see her in the rear view mirror but then he feels guilty for that. 

He feels guilty for being relieved that Rebel Bex has all but left the building, because it’s clear—or kind of clear, anyway—that she has an unexpected opportunity here tonight. It’s clear, he thinks, that she’d like to be Rebel Bex for this stretch of hours. She would like to travel back in time and give the motorcycle-riding, tight black leather–wearing version of herself a chance at a couple of slow dances, and maybe a few sips of that punch, which is very pale pink indeed. 

“Principal Dunan,” he says, taking up his supporting role as she ought to for better or worse, et cetera. “I could go get him.” 

They share a look. Principal Dunan is the obvious solution. He’s the right solution, because place is chock full of hormones and teenage trauma, and punch that is mostly one-hundred-ninety-proof grain alcohol is a really terrible addition to that mix. So she does what she has to do. _They_ do what they have to do. 

She moves to take up a post near the punch bowl. Along the way, she snatches cups from unsuspecting hands until there’s an untidy spread crowding right up to the punch bowl itself, which none may approach. She has to raise her voice once— _once_ only—to emphasize that the punch well has run dry. 

He pauses for just a moment to watch her wrangle tipsy teenagers like she was born to it—although who would want to be born to such an avocation is a mystery. He pauses, and bleeding edge Richard Castle feels no more worthy to be in the orbit of present-day Detective Beckett than little Ricky Rodgers caught in the gravitational pull of Rebel Bex. 

He pauses, then he goes. Principal Dunan, as predicted, has the punch bowl and cups wheeled away. He has phone calls in and paperwork for the discipline of the punch spiker and her accomplices; he has the situation under control, and it’s well past time they bowed ou to this mess. 

She startles a little when he comes up behind her. He wraps an arm around her shoulders and feels the warmth on the back of her neck. 

“Sometimes it sucks being the grown up.” She presses her face into his shoulder. 

“Sometimes.” He kisses her temple. “But grown-ups have better booze. _We_ have better booze at home.” 

“We _do_ have better booze.” She affirms. “Let’s go home.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Rebel Bex and Cop Bex—the war between them is not a thing


	16. Brain and Sturm and Drang—Room 147 (6 x 16)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She wonders where Pi is. She doesn’t actually care where Pi is. Nobody actually cares where Pi is. She, like the rest of them, is merely glad—for Castle’s sake, and for her own—that he is not around. She is, now that it’s a moot point, also glad for Alexis’s sake that he’s not around, though she’d been clamping down hard on that sentiment before it became a moot point. 

> _“Why would we do that when we were just trying to make this go away?”  
>  — Dr. Gustavo Bauer, Room 147 (6 x16) _

* * *

She wonders where Pi is. She doesn’t actually _care_ where Pi is. Nobody actually cares where Pi is. She, like the rest of them, is merely glad—for Castle’s sake, and for her own—that he is not around. She is, now that it’s a moot point, _also_ glad for _Alexis’s_ sake that he’s not around, though she’d been clamping down hard on that sentiment before it became a moot point. 

Pi is, and was always going to be, a pointless waste of her time and effort. She has been there, she has done that, she has tried and failed to burn the wet flannel. So, across the board, she does not care where by Pi is. But she wonders. 

He wonders, too, and she shouldn’t indulge him. She should continue to clamp down on her baseline assessment of Pi and not encourage him in his dangerous retroactive crowing. She tries not to. She tries to steer clear of anything that might be construed as encouragement of him doing some kind of victory lap, but the mystery of where Pi has gotten to is one that cries out to be solved. 

“I still don’t know how he got here.” They’re in bed. His hands are folded on his belly and he’s searching the ceiling for answers. They are talking in whispers. This is their new ritual. They begin the day wondering about Pi. “I don’t know how he got to _Costa Rica._ ” He turns his head on the pillow to meet her wide-eyed gaze. “He was counting bees. Didn’t the bees in Costa Rica still need counting? What about the Costa Rica bees’ needs?” 

She doesn’t know how he got here, either—how he got to Costa Rica and then here. She doesn’t know how he has gotten wherever it is he has finally gone. It kind of professionally bugs her. She had, in the early days of the overcrowded loft, tried some round about interrogation to see how she might solve his passport problems—how she might be able to facilitate his exit from their lives—and as far as she had been able to ascertain, the man/boy/frutarian had not a shred of legal documentation. Pi, no last name, could not have legally driven, flown, or boarded a train in or out of Gotham. And that definitely bugs her. 

“Maybe we _imagined_ him.” He makes a sudden, blind grab for her hand, though it’s clear that the prospect elates him as much as it terrifies him. “Beckett, you haven’t joined any cults have you?” 

“Yes, Castle. Because _I’m_ the one in this relationship we have to worry about joining cults.” She pinches the skin between his thumb and forefinger hard enough to make him yelp, but not hard enough to pull away. 

“The Temple of the Order of the Jedi is _not_ a cult,” he protests as he knocks their joined hands against her sternum. “It’s a—“

“Castle, if you keep talking about your cult,” she rolls on her side to scowl at him, “you’re going to find nothing but my empty robe in a pool on the floor.” 

“That’s just mean, Beckett.” He rolls on _his_ side to scowl back. “You can’t flirt with me by flaunting your extensive knowledge of _Star Wars_ lore while you’re threatening to leave me.” He finds her hand again and lifts her knuckles to his lips. “It’s completely against the rules. And anyway, I’m serious. Isn’t Pi-as-false-memory more plausible than—“ He gestures expansively with their joined hands. “I mean, more plausible than all of it?” 

She thinks of Alexis, asleep upstairs. Or no—she thinks of Alexis off to an early class, because it’s Monday, and the four of them—she and he and Alexis and Martha—are all falling into rhythms that are peaceable, compatible, livable. They are falling into rhythms that were impossible with the addition of Pi, who is definitely a pain in the ass—who is definitely not a false memory. 

She thinks about the Love Haze and how it defies the laws of documents and the needs of bees on either side of the Caribbean. She thinks about quiet conversations that aren’t exactly confidential, but they are _private,_ so she steers him away. 

“We’re still finding dust bunnies made of his hair, Castle.” The slightly nauseating reminder does its intended work. It pulls his attention in a different direction. “I’d say that argues against the false memory theory.” 

“You’re right.” He nod solemnly and grips her hand tighter. “We have to accept that he’s real. We have to be vigilant, because who knows where Pi goes? He could be anywhere.” 

“He could be anywhere,” she agrees. “But I wonder where he went.”   
  
They both wonder. And neither one of them cares. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Castle’s framed membership in the Temple of the Jedi Order? Not even a thing. 


	17. With/Stand—In the Belly of the Beast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the two of them—she and he—being brave for the record. She is still shivering uncontrollably, but she straightens her shoulders under the hideous green blanket that comes from … somewhere. He handles the interrogation of Gates, of Fowler. Fucking Fowler. He adds to his personal bravery list the fact that he has not gone right across the low table in front of him to squeeze the life out of the reckless, pathetic excuse for a cop that Fowler is. She walks her fingers under the hideous green blanket to press gently into his hip to say she knows—she knows this is him being brave. 

> _“Who wanted me to live?”  
> _ _— Kate Beckett, In the Belly of the Beast (6 x 17)_

* * *

This is the two of them—she and he—being brave for the record. She is still shivering uncontrollably, but she straightens her shoulders under the hideous green blanket that comes from … somewhere. He handles the interrogation of Gates, of Fowler. Fucking _Fowler_. He adds to his personal bravery list the fact that he has not gone right across the low table in front of him to squeeze the life out of the reckless, pathetic excuse for a cop that Fowler is. She walks her fingers under the hideous green blanket to press gently into his hip to say she knows—she _knows_ this is him being brave. 

This is the two of them being brave for their boys, who need to know they are okay—that in the not too distant future they will be okay. He does not wind a gentle arm around her. He does not hold her up, though she probably needs it, and again her grateful fingers find his body—an elbow this time to say it hurts and she _does_ need him, but they have to be brave for their boys. She has to stand under her own power as she smiles and ducks to catch their downcast eyes. They need to know they are forgiven for failing her, for leaving her to save herself. This is her standing, him letting her stand. This is the two of them being brave. 

This is the the two of them finally home—the two of them being brave, one by one. This is him being brave for her, her being brave for him. 

He swings the door open and she hobbles through, her hand reaches out behind her to hold on to him for all kinds of reasons. Her gaze, right away, finds the table for two and she falters. She sees the candles, the roses. She sees the _Something Amazing,_ forgotten in its decanter, and the chills rack her body all over again. He wants to joke. He wants to break the tension by offering her the first swig straight from the decanter, but he holds her instead. He shuts the door tight behind them and loops his arms around her as carefully as he can in deference to the mess her body is. He is brave and silent as she lives through what he lived through here, waiting, alone. He holds her until the chills subside. 

She leads him to the bedroom with slow, weary steps. She lets the hideous green blanket fall to the floor. She stands, patient and teasing, as he unzips the fleece-lined, NYPD-issue hoodie and casts it off, muttering about bombs in her apartment and her car sinking to the bottom of the Hudson, muttering that he hates the sight of the fucking thing. She lifts her arms slowly—slowly—and braces for more than the pain as he gently skims the close-fitting turtleneck upward and off her body. 

She braces for the low, anguished moan that escapes him at the sight of her lurid bruises and all the places scraped raw, the angry welts on her chest where Vulcan Simmons slammed her ribs into the edge of the steel tub, over and over again. She lifts her chin and stands as steady as the burning muscles of her legs will let her, while he studies each injury, each wound, each insult to her body. She does not curl into herself or shrink from the light as she would dearly love to do. She is brave, for his sake. 

He is the one to come apart first. He has dressed her in the softest things he can find. He has wrapped her in a blanket and installed her on the couch where she watches as he dismantles the table for two. She has let him. She has acquiesced to his fussing as long as she can. She turns imperious when she can no longer. She wants the laptop. She wants to be sitting up on the piano bench. She wants a break for the welts and bruises scraped raw on her back. He acquiesces, then he comes apart. 

It’s Bracken. Of course it’s fucking Bracken, because Vulcan Simmons was not heart-stopping enough. Because a completely unknown quantity holding her captive, believing that she was an assassin for hire was not terrifying enough. It had to be fucking _Bracken_ at the literal end of the day. 

He is brave for as long as he can be. He rises to offer his hand, to offer a challenge— _Come to bed_ —and she meets it. She rises. She takes his hand. She comes to bed. But his courage deserts him in the dark. His bravery dissolves into nothing. He comes apart, and his voice rings out, shocking and loud and disembodied. 

“I won’t ask—“ He stops. Starts. Stops again. He swallows down thick, terrified, _angry_ tears. “I won’t ask you to do nothing. I won’t ask you to walk away from this. But Kate—“ 

“I won’t.” Her fingers walk across the bed to hook around his, to press their palms close in a vow. “I won’t … go off by myself like I did. Castle, I promise you. I will not do anything without you.” 

“Good,” he says. His voice breaks. They lie there in the dark, palms pressed close, she and he, being brave for one another. “Good, then.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Wine, undrunk—not a thing.


	18. Isobar—The Way of the Ninja (6 x 18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s not a national holiday, but there’s sex the night they close Jade Yamata’s case. It gets an A+ rating. It’s a little bit about Carly and her fall from over-the-top grace. She is certainly emphatic about enjoying herself, and he reliably enjoys himself when she’s enjoying herself, so it’s definitely a little bit about the way he can render her wordless and out of her mind in the best possible sense. It’s also a little bit about him, against all odds, surviving the Gates’s post-shuriken wrath. So she drifts off into sated bliss. No worries on the sex front, then.

> _“That’s what I like about you – was it that bad?”  
> _ _— Kevin Ryan, The Way of the Ninja (6 x 18)_

* * *

It’s not a national holiday, but there’s sex the night they close Jade Yamata’s case. It gets an _A+_ rating. It’s a little bit about Carly and her fall from over-the-top grace. She is certainly emphatic about enjoying herself, and he reliably enjoys himself when _she’s_ enjoying herself, so it’s definitely a little bit about the way he can render her wordless and out of her mind in the best possible sense. It’s also a little bit about him, against all odds, surviving the Gates’s post-shuriken wrath. So she drifts off into sated bliss. No worries on the sex front, then.

There’s breakfast in bed the next morning—or coffee and the paper in bed, which amounts to the same thing. There’s a flower in the corner of the tray, something purple, unusual, stunning.

“Pincushion flower,” he tells her, sounding proud of himself. It’s roses most days, and the occasional peony. It’s a single white tulip or lily. But today it’s this—purple, unusual, stunning.

He burrows his way back under the covers and curls an arm around her. They sip their coffee side by side and share the paper, though there’s a certain amount of bickering over that. There is always a certain amount of bickering over that.

“What?” he asks when she stops, suddenly, mid-bicker. He tucks his chin awkwardly to give her a sideways look.

“Nothing,” she murmurs, and it is nothing. She reaches out to brush a tentative finger over the textured center of a flower that—stunning as it is—happens to be part of their routine. There is breakfast in bed the morning after _A+_ sex. There’s coffee, the paper, a flower and bickering.

There is the work. There are the familiar rhythms that are theirs—he presses the call button for the elevator, she presses the floor. She fixes him with the first _at-work_ glare of the morning, It starts the clock on the thirty minutes of silence he is required by law to give her so she can clear the decks and steel herself for the moment the next call comes in and they’re off to wherever the body is. He is allowed to stay in his chair if he can sit quietly and play on his phone while she’s working.

There is the music of their conversation in the car. It’s a mixture of things, these days. He still makes wild guesses based on nothing more than a victim’s vitals and the address. His mind still pings from bizarre non sequitur to bizarre non sequitur. But there’s the laundry mixed in. There are little household things they enter into one another’s mental to-do list, because that’s how intertwined their two lives have become.

There is home at the end of a long day—a shower together, because he says, as he always says, he gets lonely, and the damned shower stall is big certainly enough for that to be plausible. And then there are comfortable clothes, and they dance easily past one another as they make dinner, then carry their plates to his office. They can eat with their feet up in front of some movie with a low bar to entry, because they’re both tired. Because they’ll talk through most of it, as they always do when the movie is dumb enough.

“What?” he asks. She has stopped suddenly again. They were in the middle of idle chatter and she has fallen silent. He gives her a sideways look again and reaches for the remote so he can pause the movie neither of them is really watching.

“Nothing,” she says, and it _is_ nothing. It’s just that this is all routine. From life-affirming, boredom-deterring, _A+_ sex through the arc of their day together, from then to now, this is their routine. She shakes her head as she smiles. She doesn’t have the words for what she wants to say. That’s his job.

“Something.” He nudges the knee she’s slung over the wide arm of the leather chair. “You’ve been … pensive all day. What?”

“Pensive,” she snorts. She gives his knee a retaliatory nudge. “I was just thinking … this is a day.” She brings a splayed palm down on to the arm of the chair as though she can pin down the details she has spent the day taking in. “These are our days.” 

He understands. He plucks the unformed idea from the air and nods. “Our routine.” He nods again, less certain now. “And it’s good, right? Not boring?”

She reaches for his hand. She traces meaningless shapes on the surface of his palm. She’s choked up suddenly with all the little ways they care for one another, with all they have to say. She presses her palm to his. “Not boring.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N : Pin cushion flowers are a thing. This is not a thing.


	19. Shade—The Greater Good (6 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nuance is exhausting. It’s his bread and butter as a writer—at least when it comes to his protagonists—but in the real world, nuance exhausting. He has spent the days investigating Peter Cordero’s murder building a wonderfully hard-nosed, terribly unlikable character around Gates’s sister only to have that house of cards huffed and puffed at by the genuine horror on the woman’s face when she realized what villainy her attitude—her words—had led Stephanie Goldmark into. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: If you care, there are spoilers for the Nikki Heat books in this, specifically for Raging Heat. 

> _“Oh, is that what you tell yourself os you can sleep at night?”  
> _ _— Victoria Gates, The Greater Good (6 x19)_

* * *

Nuance is exhausting. It’s his bread and butter as a writer—at least when it comes to his protagonists—but in the real world, nuance exhausting. He has spent the days investigating Peter Cordero’s murder building a wonderfully hard-nosed, terribly unlikable character around Gates’s sister only to have that house of cards huffed and puffed at by the genuine horror on the woman’s face when she realized what villainy her attitude—her words—had led Stephanie Goldmark into. 

And he’s nowhere close to ready to deal with the nuances of the Captain herself, even if this case has sort of dropped those right on top of him like a paradoxical ton of bricks. He has, over time, come to cringe at Wally Irons—the broad, bumbling character he had dashed off in an hour so dark it still haunts him. Mourning Roy, drowning in anger with and longing for her, finding himself abruptly banished from the work that represented all he’d had to hold on to, he had dashed off a caricature—unkind, uninteresting, without nuance. 

For three books now, going on four, Wally Irons has made him cringe, but he’s also been a guilty pleasure. He’s easy to write: A nemesis with utterly simple, utterly transparent motivations and only one game mechanic—pathological aversion to risk. Captain Wally behaves as he is meant to behave on every page—unlike a certain Detective Heat—and in his heart of hearts, he thinks it’s rather rude of Gates to go upsetting his caricature apple cart. He thinks that she could stop and think about _his_ needs before she goes and gets interesting. 

But she is interesting, isn’t she? He thinks about the simplicity of the story Beckett has relayed to him in whispers—the promise of a big get in exchange for bending the rules, for letting just one thing go. He thinks, with surprise and no small amount of residual hurt and pang of conscience, of the other story Kate has relayed just tonight of _her_ first glimpse of the Captain’s complexities—a conversation from years back when he was the one pleading for this, for her to wait, to find another way, to not sabotage the political career of the man he called friend. 

_Who holds him accountable?_

_You do your job, whatever the cost._

He could write her—he could continue to write her—in the spirit of Wally Irons as rigid and plodding. He could continue to write her as a scold and an obstacle to justice. He could continue to write this character utterly without nuance, but he’s stuck on this _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes_ vibe that’s obvious and vital and almost exactly the epiphany he’d ended up writing for Nikki in the very book where he’d first introduced the stupid, cringe-y, seductively easy to write Wally Irons. 

He’s stuck on the metaphor of jigsaw puzzles. He is a box guy, He is inclined to grab the lid and take in the big picture. He is inclined to dive in and work from the top down, which is—come to think of it—how he has ended up with a four-hundred-person guest list. Because he just _knows,_ globally, that Connelly has to be on the list and that has to be sprawls all the way out to Wes Craven. 

He just _knows,_ and that has something to do with the fact that he is the kind of guy who ends up having assembled amorphous, isolated sections that have nothing to do with one another before someone like Gates has finished turning every piece face up and sorting things into corners and middle piles, and his sudden awareness of this distinction is exhausting. These metaphor and nuances and complexities are _exhausting_ , but that doesn’t mean that tackling them isn’t worthwhile. 

His head is spinning with it all. His mind is spiraling in the dark when it should be switched off for a peaceful, nuance-free night. It’s not, though, so he kicks off the covers and heads for his desk. He opens _Raging Heat to_ some early chapter with good old, reliable Wally in it. He plants a seed. He shifts to pen and paper. He sketches out the arc of the thing, what beat will best fall where. He turns back to the laptop and almost has a heart attack at the sight of Kate, squinting at him in sheer exhaustion, standing a foot away. 

“Castle, what are you doing?” she rasps. 

She reaches out to shut the laptop, but he stays her hand. “Killing Wally Irons. But then I’m going to tackle the guest list. I think we have to flip all the pieces over first. We have sort out corners and middle pieces and have a strategy—“ 

“What?’ She shakes off the hold he has on her wrist. “Castle, it’s the middle of the night.” 

“I know.” He stands. He curls an arm around her waist and usher her briskly back to bed. “It is the middle of the night, so I’ll just kill off Wally Irons and come right to bed.” 

She’s too tired to object, and too sleep baffled to fight. “And then the list. Tomorrow the list.” 

“The list,” he agrees. He kisses her forehead and delights in the way the furrow in her brow smooths swiftly away at his touch. “Tomorrow, the list. The jigsaw approach.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Jigsaws? What? This is aggressively not a thing. 


	20. Crimes and Misdemeanors—That 70s Show (6 x 20)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The seventies were kinder to women than to men, she thinks as she stands at the edge of the dance floor and scans the scene—kinder in terms of fashion at least. Lanie and Tory, Gates and Alexis, even Martha in an outfit that either looks like she’s just escaped a cult or she’s singing backup for Bobbie Gentry on the Smothers Brothers, has a certain something. And Kate herself … well, the way the dress skims her body, the way her hair hangs loose and wild, she doesn’t need the wolfish looks Castle keeps shooting her to tell her how she looks.

> _“So all this mess, this ridiculous display, and you have nothing to show for it?”_   
>  _— Victoria Gates, That 70s Show (6 x 20)_

* * *

The seventies were kinder to women than to men, she thinks as she stands at the edge of the dance floor and scans the scene—kinder in terms of fashion at least. Lanie and Tory, Gates and Alexis, even Martha in an outfit that either looks like she’s just escaped a cult or she’s singing backup for Bobbie Gentry on the Smothers Brothers, has a certain something. And Kate herself … well, the way the dress skims her body, the way her hair hangs loose and wild, she doesn’t need the wolfish looks Castle keeps shooting her to tell her how _she_ looks.

But the men, in general, don’t fare well in this era. Harold looks fine. He looks good, in fact, probably because he has belonged here for so long. But the rest of the boys look ridiculous. Esposito’s pseudo-Afro keeps threatening to consume his ridiculous mustache whole—or maybe it’s the other way around. Ryan’s stringy blonde hair and equally dire cop-stache make him look simultaneously twelve and eighty years old. 

And then there’s Castle, who—even without benefit of the mustache it seems every male-bodied individual sprouted as the sun set on the sixties—manages to look the most over-the-top, the most ridiculous. White polyester, really? And a three-piece suit no less, with pitch black shirt underneath, its collar wide enough that it has to pay rent in every borough. Down to his black, Cuban-heeled shoes, he has gone full John Travolta, and he looks utterly ridiculous. 

She kind of wants to make out with him. 

It’s the whisky talking, not the white polyester or the side-part and swoop of hair falling across his forehead. It’s Harold and the two-handed kiss he presses to the sky in memory of Vince, in mourning for Vince. It’s the heartbreaking romance of it all, definitely not the way his hips twitch in the high-waisted, close fitting trousers. It has nothing to do with that. It’s definitely the whisky, and she is not listening to whisky, because everyone they know is there and she’s not fifteen years old and he looks absolutely ridiculous, because seventies fashion was a hate crime perpetrated on the male of the species. 

She’s not listening to whisky because on top of the fact that he looks ridiculous and not at all attractive, because no man could look attractive in that get up—but on _top_ of that, it would actually be disrespectful to Harold and the memory of Vince to yank him by that enormous collar off into some corner of the club that is _not_ lit up from below and try to set a new personal best for getting to second base. 

Harold and Vince never had the luxury of dancing close in public like she and he are right now. Harold and Vince _had_ to sneak off, if they even gave into their feelings that far. Given their world, with its swagger and machismo, they might well _still_ have to sneak off, even here and now. 

So it would be disrespectful, and furthermore, he looks really dumb, and she is not fifteen years old, and listening to whisky is as close to universally bad as an idea gets. Except she kind of wants to listen to whisky. And it doesn’t—it _really_ doesn’t—have anything to do with the sudden onset of a fetish for utterly artificial fabrics. It has to do with the wedding. 

She wants it to happen. She wants the wedding to be here already, because she’s excited about the main event itself. Despite the guest list woes, the venue woes, and their frequent run-ins with Martha’s deeply theatrical aesthetic, she is looking forward to the ceremony and celebration they have planned. 

She’s excited about the silliest things like their wedding bands, the vows she’s agonizing over, but getting written day by day. She’s genuinely enjoying hunting for a gift for him, a gift for Lanie in thanks for her being Kate’s maid-of-honor. She wants to be married to him already. She wants to have a husband and she wants to be a wife, and it’s as staid and corny as hell. It’s all so conventional that she knows her mother would have teased her mercilessly. She knows Rebel Bex would roll her eyes and mime puking, but she is excited for all those things. 

But she also kind of wants to sneak off and make out with him. She wants to transgress and feel that breathless concern about getting caught that isn’t really concern, it’s a high. She wants Rebel Bex to stop rolling her eyes and come out to play, because she’s over the Carly thing—she is absolutely certain that they are not going to fall into some boring routine—but she does feel like the clock is running out on this kind of naughty, and okay, fine, she is _into_ the stupid white polyester and the hair and the shoes. She misses his gold chain from earlier. It’s working for her. It’s all working for her and she is officially listening to whisky. 

She sidles up behind him. She hooks a finger through one high-waisted belt loop and lets her breath wash over his ear. She rises up on tiptoe for the effect of it all, and whispers, “Hey, Castle. You wanna make out?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Beckett’s self-control in the face of Castle’s dumb outfits is very definitely not a thing. 


	21. Clockwork—Law and Boarder (6 x 21)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a strange shift in the dynamics of his world—a weirdly gendered shift. It takes him a little while to notice, because he is in the depths of despair over his Scrabble loss. He is in denial, because he does not lose at Scrabble. 

> _“Everything good?”  
>  —Kevin Ryan, Law and Boarder (6 x 21)_

* * *

There’s a strange shift in the dynamics of his world—a weirdly gendered shift. It takes him a little while to notice, because he is in the depths of despair over his Scrabble loss. He is in _denial,_ because he does _not_ lose at Scrabble. 

He barely acknowledges his mother the morning after. She is up and chattering. She takes in the scene and understands immediately what has happened, even though what has happened is something that does. not. happen. She taunts him lightly about it. She teases him when she sees it’s serious—that he is seriously disturbed and tries to get him to see that it’s an _honor_ to be beaten by someone as intelligent and well-rounded as Kate Beckett. 

That line of argument sounds the first warning bell—it signals the coming shift. The woman herself is the next bell. She is putting the finishing touches on her work outfit. She is is rested and fresh and ready to make the world safer, one murder at a time. She is a badass and a newly crowned Scrabble champion, and in what world is _that_ fair? 

Alexis is bell number three. She is incredulous about his devastating loss—or she at least _sounds_ incredulous. She tosses that take into the ring and his mother re-launches her theatrical marveling schtick. There is a surreptitious fist bump, and suddenly he wonders if this _is_ theater. He wonders if their mutual shock and awe is something they orchestrated overnight, texting or maybe using their witchy feminine powers of telepathy as he sat with his butt growing numb on the couch, trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. 

He opens his mouth to say something about it—to squawk or protest or possibly whine about his mother, his daughter, his soon-to-be wife ganging up on him. He opens his mouth and his sleep-deprived brain suddenly zigs, suddenly zags, and he snaps his mouth shut. His mother, his daughter, his soon-to-be wife—they are plotting against him—and he loves it. He loves the shift and he loves the relationships the three of them have forged with one another, even if the first agenda item for their newly minted alliance is to take his Scrabble crown and gloat. 

He and his sleep-deprived brain are wondering if his ego will survive the feminine onslaught, but it turns out the boys unexpectedly have his back. It’s so strange, as if the workings of the universe are evident in the frequency at which his bones vibrate. It’s a weird metaphor, but he’s tired and a recently deposed champion, so he rolls with it. 

Warmth blooms within him under the nigh-on-constant attention they boys are suddenly paying him. He, apparently, merits a novelty pen, a sacred and secret recipe, an unsolicited coffee and more attention than he ultimately knows what to do with. 

That last part is pretty literal. He doesn’t know what to do with male friendships. Life has conspired to surround him with women—wonderful women who band together to gang up up on him—and he’s always been a bit at a loss with guys, the emotional tone they do and don’t strike, and in general, how they behave with one another. He’s in good company in this case, because whatever’s going on between the two of them also seems to be going on with him, and he’s not quite sure what he can do other than be the willing recipient of their sudden, effusive, strangely competitive interest. 

What’s going on with them takes longer than it should to dawn on him. He’s a little embarrassed about what that reveals about himself, the long arc of his history, studded with buddies and classmates and rivals and bullies, but not a lot in the way of real friends of the male persuasion. 

He’s touched by it deeply—their stupid jockeying for the position, and the fact that either one, let alone both of them are interested in the role feels remarkable to him. Their competition is such a guy thing, and it’s rather thrilling to be in the center of one at this late date. It feels like the gears of the universe are working over time to keep up with this sudden shift in his far-from-conventual milieu. 

It feels like the teeth in one tiny cog finding the teeth in the other and moving his universe like clockwork. High over head in the tower, keeping watch, he’s got the ladies getting their rest, all the better to gang up on others without breaking a sweat. Here on the ground, he’s got the boys sucking up to him. 

It’s a clockwork shift in his universe, and it’s good. It’s all good. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Ugh is a thing. This is not a thing. 


	22. Uncaged—Veritas (6 x 22)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She expects the ghost of her mother that first night afterward, and she comes—not the ghost, but the memory of her. A flood of memories comes, and it is joyous to the point of making her heart hurt as something deep within her gives way, gives permission for her to have this—to remember. A flood of memories comes, and it is sorrowful to the point of making her heart hurt, because it is not her mother’s ghost, it is the memory of her. It is a flood of memories and not … more than that. It is not TV or Hollywood or the pages of one of the Nikki Heat books, so what comes is nothing more than the memory of her. 

> _“And you were reviewing the files to see if they might have missed something?”  
> _ _— Roy Montgomery, Veritas (6 x 22)_

* * *

She expects the ghost of her mother that first night afterward, and she comes—not the ghost, but the memory of her. A flood of memories comes, and it is joyous to the point of making her heart hurt as something deep within her gives way, gives _permission_ for her to have this—to remember. A flood of memories comes, and it is sorrowful to the point of making her heart hurt, because it is _not_ her mother’s ghost, it is the memory of her. It is a flood of memories and not … more than that. It is not TV or Hollywood or the pages of one of the Nikki Heat books, so what comes is nothing more than the memory of her. 

She does not expect the ghost of Roy Montgomery, but there he is for the second time in as many days. There he is, and far closer to a ghost than her mother is on this, the first night of the rest of her life. There are details here—sensory data that recall her to that moment, so many years ago, almost without emotion. There is the Captain with hair, just a dusting of it, but _hair_ , and how can she have forgotten that? How is it that her memory has edited out the man’s hair entirely? 

There’s the space—the details she remembers about the archives, though she’d have thought that her mind would have long since chewed up and spit out most if not all of that unpleasantness. But she hears, with perfect recall, the heart-stopping sound of men’s shoes echoing on the cracked tile—something too high quality to have come from any of the typical uniform stores. She feels the creak of her spine as she tries to stand up straighter than straight, and the tight knot of hair at the nape of her neck. She has the exact corner-of-her-eye view of the the file box for her mom’s case, its contents fanned across the narrow work table. She remembers the cross-hatch pattern on the crime scene photos from the light falling in from the far side of the cage.

The cage. She hears the ring of it every time she forgets how narrow the stupid table is and shoves the box against it. The diagonal squares of light falling on the pages, the photos, the backs of her hands. It’s another ghost, unexpected and perplexing. She finds herself waking him—urgently waking him. 

“Kate. What is it?” He rolls toward her the moment her fingers touch his shoulder. 

“You weren’t asleep.” It’s an accusation at first, then it’s guilt. “You weren’t sleeping.” She sighs. “Is my head that loud?” 

“Not loud,” he chuckles as he arranges her in his arms. “A little alarmingly not loud, but that’s not it.” He presses a kiss to her lips to stop the apology bubbling up there. “I learned my lesson falling asleep the night you went after Vulcan Simmons.” 

There’s a little bite to that. She’s not entirely forgiven. It’s comforting in its way. “Sorry,” she whispers. She presses a kiss to _his_ lips so he won’t try to stop her this time. “Sorry.” 

“What’s up?” He smooths the hair back from her forehead. “You were waking me, but there was no waking.” He gives her a goofy grin, then softens. “What’s up?” 

“The archives.” The swiftness of the reply surprises her. The flat insistence that this is what the ghosts that are and are not rattling around inside her alarmingly not loud head would like to hear about. “You went to the archives and got my mom’s case.” There’s a brief, bright flare of rage just then, even after all these years, but that’s just it—it’s old habit, and it dies away soon enough. “You were there in the cage.” 

“I was.” He shimmies down the bed an inch or two so they’re nose-to-nose, so he can look her in the eye. 

“It’s gross.” Her nose wrinkles as the visceral memory of the _smell_ down there hits the back of her throat—cardboard that’s been wet, paper that is wrinkled and spotted with mold. The lingering funk of food from a thousand meals heated in the unreliable microwave. 

“It is …” He hesitates. “And the work tables are awful. I kept banging my knees on the stupid lip. And they’re so—“

“Narrow!” she cuts him off. “Everything keeps ending up on the floor and the light—“ 

“The worst.” He shakes his head, the tip of his nose brushing the tip of hers as he does. “Bare bulbs in cages? Like someone’s going to steal the bulbs? What kind of riff raff do you have wandering around down there anyway?” 

“Well, you for starters.” She grins as she knocks her forehead against his. They share a soft laugh that has something just a little desperate, exhausted, hysterical in it. They fall quiet, but the ghosts aren’t quite done with her yet. “Will you … tell me about it?” 

“About—“ He swallows. She gets the feeling he’s nervous for her, not for himself. Not a lot for himself, anyway. “About … being down there? With your mother’s case?” 

“Yeah.” She nods. That’s what she’s asking. “I want to know.” She drags her fingers through his hair, a gesture of reassurance. “I think it’s time. I just want to know everything.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Cage funk! Probably not a thing. Much like this. 


	23. A Trembling Of—For Better or Worse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He loves her and he fears her. These are the anchoring points of their relationship—the anchoring points of his whole world, these days, and three words from a city employee should not be able to pry them up and set the two of them adrift. Proof of divorce? Nothing in this or any other universe should be able to pry them up and set the two of them adrift, and yet here they are. He loves her no less—he could never love her any less—but right now, he fears for her, and that is a rip in the very fabric of reality. But how can he do otherwise? 

> _“How’s that for love?”  
> _ _— Tildy Maguire, For Better or Worse (6 x 23)_

* * *

He loves her and he fears her. These are the anchoring points of their relationship—the anchoring points of his whole world, these days, and three words from a city employee should not be able to pry them up and set the two of them adrift. _Proof of divorce?_ Nothing in this or any other universe should be able to pry them up and set the two of them adrift, and yet here they are. He loves her no less—he could never love her any less—but right now, he fears _for_ her, and that is a rip in the very fabric of reality. But how can he do otherwise? 

Here she is, silent in the back of the cab. She has not said—will not say—one word as they lurch their way through the horrors of late afternoon traffic in Manhattan, and he’d like to think it’s the inadequate privacy offered by the plexiglass barrier that has sealed her lips. He’d like to believe that she’s so enchanted by the memory of the days when Paul Sorvino or Joe Torre or Eartha Kitt reminded New York taxi passengers to buckle up, take their belongings, get a receipt before exiting the back seat, she has nothing to say about the present. He’d like to believe that three words from a city employee have not fundamentally altered her lovable, fear-inspiring self, and yet … 

Here she is, finally home, and yet there is nothing like relief here. There is nothing like relief anywhere in sight. Here she is with her head in her hands, and they’re telling his mother, they’re telling his daughter, because they kind of _have to_ tell them. They very probably are kind of going to have to tell _everyone,_ but this tiny test balloon at him is so awful. 

His mother—she of the child-producing one-night stand with a probable sociopath is volubly incredulous: _Who is Rogan O’Leary?_ His daughter—she of the lease with the bee-counting, continent-hopping, passport-losing peace disturbing Pi is volubly appalled: _And you_ married _him?_ He of an untold number of colossal mistakes in the personal and professional realms, in the public eye and in private, is damnably smug: _And here I thought you were a one and done kind of girl._

He regrets it the instant it’s out of his mouth. He bounces around the tattered remnants of reality. He goes back in _time_ and regrets it, except there is a moment, there is an instant, there is the merest spark of absolute _fury_ behind her eyes, and he feels the world come right. He feels reality knitting itself back up again. He feels himself quaking in his bespoke boots, secure in the knowledge that she will make him pay, and he is fine with that. He is absolutely fine. 

He loves her and he fears her, these are the anchors of his entire world, gloriously restored, and that is just as it should be. 

* * *

He loves her and he fears her and he loves her just that little bit more when everything fearsome about her is directed at someone else. Oh, how he loves being able to watch the fireworks from minimum safe distance, so he’s excited when she sets off for Willow Creek. He’s racked with guilt and uncertainty, too, because she’s going alone and he worries that it’s self-flagellation—that it’s an occasion to be afraid _for_ her—but ultimately, he’s _excited_. 

She is determined when she leaves. She has her keys clutched in her fist and she won’t take an overnight bag. 

“Not even a toothbrush?” He turns up the innocence. It’s a calculated risk. It’s more fuel for the fire that burning in her, fierce and bright now, and it works.

“Not. Even. A toothbrush.” She enunciates each and every letter. She grabs the front of his shirt with her free hand and reels him in until they’re sharing air molecules. “Won’t need it.”

And then she’s gone, but not gone. 

She is on the other end of the phone as soon as she has hunted down her soon-but-not-soon-enough-to-be ex. She is fierce, _roaring_ as she rails against the stupidity of the quest he’s sent her on. 

_“Like he’s the damned Wizard of Oz,”_ she snarls.

“More like the Wizard of Id,” he quips. He’s thinking about being eighteen and _all_ primitive instinct. He’s thinking about drunken nights on the strip and impulse weddings. He’s not really thinking, and it’s fuel for the fire. He swears she’s scorched his ear, she’s scorched the whole side of his brain closest to the phone, so maybe that’s a little too much fuel. 

Except he thinks that might be what sustains her through the abduction of Rogan, through the indifference and grudging pity of the local constabulary. He tells himself on his own frantic drive up to Willow Creek that he’s managed to make her spitting mad enough that she’s not sitting there, alone, with her head in her hands. 

It’s true. It’s mostly true that she’s down to embers when he gets there, but there’s more than enough Logan-related fury to go around. There’s coma wife and the sheer madness of digging through his pornographic electronic mash notes. There are bikers and strippers and a murderous mob boss. There is an entire Logan-based mad, mad, mad, mad world and she is definitely mad about it. 

She is quick thinking and—other than a few slightly moist moments about the dress—she is laser focused on getting this done. She is mean to Logan, and after the whole _Man Parts_ contretemps, that is a delight and a turn on and the world turning beautifully on its axis precisely as it should turn. 

She is a warrior goddess, hell bent on marrying him— _him—_ and he is blown away by that honor and privilege.

He loves her. He fears her. He’s going to marry her. 

* * *

He loves her. He just _loves_ her. It’s hard for them to part ways in stupid Willow Creek, but there’s really nothing for it. She has her car, and he has his. He has to get to the city. He has to start the paperwork on its warp speed journey through the system, and she has to get to the Hamptons to figure out what she’s going to wear. 

“I’m all for nothing at—“ 

She cuts that off with a twist of his ear that takes him right back to the beginning—right back to when she was Our Lady of Smug, patron saint of the One and Done Girl—and that makes it _really_ hard to part ways, because he would love to get in some last-minute fear and trembling in one back seat or the other before she makes an honest man of him. He _really_ would but there’s just no time. He has to settle for backing her up hard against the driver’s side door of her car and kissing the life out of her. He has to settle for the same as she backs _him_ up hard against the passenger side door of _his_ car where it’s pulled up alongside hers. _They_ have to settle for peeling their bodies apart, breathless, eager, and reluctant, all at once. 

“Be safe,” she breathes, her forehead pressed against his. “Hurry, but be safe.” 

“You, too.” He steals one last kiss, then hurries around the hood to slide behind the wheel, to get on with it. 

He’s not three miles down the road when his phone rings through the car’s bluetooth. He feels an eager grin spread across his face as he thumbs the button. “Miss me already?” 

_“No,”_ she retorts immediately, adamantly. “ _Yes_ ,” she admits slowly, reluctantly. _“Shut up,”_ she orders, shooting an arrow of fear right through his heart, though it softens—it downright melts—when she adds, “Keep me company.” 

He does. He keeps her company, though there’s not a lot of heavy lifting involved. She wants to talk—a positivity rarity for her—and other than her, there’s little he loves more in this stitched-up, much-mended reality than to listen when the mood strikes her. So he listens as she wanders far and wide, as she roams through the month or so of Rogan, and when the time is right, he is going to have _so_ many follow-up questions about where Eddie Vedder’s jean jacket wound up and exactly how far she can chuck a hoagie while running down the strip full tilt. 

It’s not all fun and games, though. How could it be? But it’s okay. He loves her. He _loves_ her, and when it comes to the place where this was always leading, he’s there. He’s on the other end of the phone. He’s listening. 

_“I was married then. When my mom died.”_ Her voice is even. It’s controlled, though he can hear her heaving a shaky sigh. _“I told her the whole saga._ ” Another shaky sigh.”Almost _the whole saga with Rogan. We laughed about it.”_ There’s a silence long enough that he’s worried the call has dropped, but her voice fills up the speakers again. _“I feel like I have to … confess to her or something. Give her a chance to say I told you so. I feel like I owe her that.”_

It’s a heartsore place for things to land. He doesn’t have a joke or anything gallant locked and loaded, but that doesn’t feel right anyway. He’d tear another hole in the fabric of reality if he could. He’d give her closure. He _will_ give her closure if he can—a trip to her mom’s grave with her hand in his, a letter written and burned, its ashes scattered on the wind, whatever she wants, he’ll do. 

_“I’m okay, Castle,”_ she says quietly, she says knowing he was wondering. “Really.” 

“I know you are,” he says, and it’s true. “I’m glad you are.” 

That’s true, too, in the most comprehensive sense. He is glad she’s okay. He is glad of whoever, whatever, however she is in any given moment. 

He hears the road beneath his own tires, the road beneath hers. She stays on the line, though she is quiet now and a little sad. She wants things he can’t give her—he hasn’t yet devised a way to give her—and that’s a little maddening. But she is more than okay, and he is more than okay with that. She is fierce and fear-inducing and lonely for her mom and a little bit raw right now.

He loves her and he fears her. He has the twin anchors for his whole world on the other end of the line. That’s as it should be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: A group of finches is called a trembling. That is a thing. This is not a thing. It is an uneven atrocity, not a thing. 


End file.
